If Cary Grant was the king of the screwball comedy, then the queen was Carole Lombard. Grant and Lombard appeared in the same film three times before Lombard's untimely death in 1942, but none of those films was a comedy. In Sinners in the Sun, Grant had no more than five or six minutes of screen time in total opposite Lombard. In The Eagle and the Hawk, they never shared the screen at all. The only true co-starring vehicle they made together was In Name Only (1939, directed by John Cromwell), a romantic drama. It is ironic that Grant's most famous comedy co-stars--Irene Dunne and Katherine Hepburn--were primarily known as dramatic actresses, while the greatest female comedienne of the age made only dramas with him. This teaming of Lombard and Grant might not have happened at all if Katherine Hepburn hadn't been tagged as "box office poison" in the press after the failures of Bringing Up Baby and Holiday (among other films). Hepburn had subsequently been released from her contract with RKO. It is conceivable that his trio of early films with Hepburn delayed or inhibited Grant's ascent to superstardom. None of them was a financial success in spite of the classic status accorded them years after the fact. In any event, Hepburn was out and Lombard was in. Lombard herself was taking a break from comedies. Her other film from 1939 was Made for Each Other opposite James Stewart, another weepie directed by John Cromwell. It had been a financial disaster. Lombard's life at the time paralleled the plot of In Name Only. She was biding her time until Clark Gable could divorce his wife and she could marry him. Gable, for his part, was off making Gone With the Wind. Her career at the time was also eerily similar to Grant's. Like Grant, she had been contracted to Paramount during her early career, a contract that she finished in 1938. Like Grant, she had chosen to become a free agent when that contract expired. Like Grant, she wasn't starring in comedies in 1939 (Grant's other two films that year, Only Angels Have Wings and Gunga Din, were nominally adventure stories). For both actors, In Name Only was something of a crossroads. Grant had already had a couple of big hits after he left Paramount, though he had had some disappointments, too. He hadn't had a major hit in a serious drama, though. Lombard hadn't yet had her own hit after leaving Paramount and it remained to be seen if she could carry a serious drama. In Name Only turned out to be a film both of them needed. It was moderately successful.
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