Edgar Allan Pooh . . . with CASABLANCA's special effects prowess, you'll start getting into the mood for ONCE UPON A HONEYMOON. Throw in some "Jew for a Day" shenanigans from THE BOY IN THE STRIPED PAJAMAS, and you know that this flick will be good for a barrel of laughs. Throughout ONCE UPON A HONEYMOON "Dolfie" Hitler Himself keeps turning up like a glad Benny due to the miracle of Archival Footage. HONEYMOON first came out during Hitler's Heyday, as Der Fuhrer still basked in the afterglow of beating D.J. Trump to Time Magazine's hallowed and greatly esteemed "Man of the Year" Award. RKO Radio Studio could NOT forecast the outcome of World War Two with any certainty when they released HONEYMOON, which explains why this flick is so "Fair and Balanced" toward ALL SIDES. Since multiple copies of HONEYMOON were retrieved by the Nazi Navy from torpedoed and sinking Allied Troop Ships, it's a safe bet that Dolfie Himself got many a chuckle while watching it a time or ten in his Bunker. HONEYMOON does for Occupied Europe what ROMAN HOLIDAY would later do for the Homeland of Hitler's Brat-Biting Buddy (if you recall that Pre-Weird Al apocryphal verse to "Whistle While You Work"), B. Mussolini.

Prismark10 Once Upon a Honeymoon is a curious hybrid comedy drama released a year after the USA entered the second world war. In his heart it is a screwball romantic comedy starring Ginger Rogers as a gold digging burlesque artist who has bagged an Austrian Baron who is also a dubious Nazi. In fact they go on a goodwill honeymoon and every country the Baron visits falls into Nazi rule.Cary Grant plays a hot shot reporter intrigued by the Baron and who wants to let Rogers know who her husband truly is. Over the course of the movie, Grant falls for Rogers and later Rogers decides to do her own bit for the Allied war effort and puts herself in danger.Grant and Rogers make a good pairing, Walter Slezak is the crafty Nazi apparatchik. The film veers from comedy to exposing Jewish persecution by the Nazis. It is an odd mix but it somehow works and saves the movie from blandness.

jhsteel This film is great because I love Cary Grant, but I was surprised that in 1942 people were making what appeared to be a comedy about Hitler. It seems similar to a comedy being made about Daesh now: the evil that is killing millions of people across Europe was being treated light-heartedly by US film makers in 1942. However, the sense of humour needed to fight a war of that nature probably helped everyone to focus their efforts to defeat the enemy. The characters of the Nazis seems almost humorous, Cary Grant and Ginger Rogers were their usual wonderful selves, and it was very light and enjoyable. I had to look at the date when it was made, in order to understand the context.

Irie212 One of the few successful directors of an anti-Nazi comedy, Mel Brooks, said, "We want to get people laughing; we don't want to offend anybody." In "Once Upon a Honeymoon," writer/director Leo McCarey manages to fail spectacularly at both rather obvious pieces of comedy wisdom.Casting another axiom to the winds ("Brevity is the soul of wit") the movie is two hours long and must have been made in a hurry to get it into theaters on Nov. 27, 1942, less than a year after the U.S. declared war on Germany. It is full-blown anti-Nazi propaganda (with cartoon Nazis, of course, this isn't "Conspiracy") but it is twisted into a screwball comedy (and it isn't "To Be or Not to Be" either). Screwball propaganda isn't a natural genre, to say the least, but it might have worked in 1942, when Americans were humming, "Hitler has only got one ball..." But I checked contemporary reviews and found that even the New York Times' critic, the moralistic Bosley Crowther, called the movie "callous." The plot is preposterous. Kathie O'Hara (Ginger Rogers) is a Brooklyn stripper posing as a European aristocrat. He accent is on par with Keanu Reeves' as Jonathan Harker in "Dracula." (I welcome nominees for worse accents.) O'Hara has gotten herself engaged to a plutocratic German Baron (Walter Slezak), who is also a high ranking Nazi, but that fact is something she refuses believe of her wealthy Schnuckiputzi. Enter Cary Grant, playing an American journalist on the Baron's trail. Grant is the only reason to watch this cinematic casualty of war, which starts in Vienna on the very day-- oh, but this deserves its own paragraph,Ginger and the Baron are at the Hotel Imperial in Vienna when-- to her surprise, but not his-- Adolf himself appears on that hotel's balcony to cheering Austrians: Happy Anschluss! So as I sat bolt upright at the possibility of glimpsing Hitler (will an actor actually play him...?), but McCarey attempts to tickle my alert ribs instead. Here's how: Grant calls out to Rogers in another room, "Hey, Hitler's here!" Her reply: "Well, I can't see him now, I'm dressing." Laughing yet? Long story short: the Baron is the engineer behind every nation that falls to the Third Reich. Playing geographical dominoes, he topples Czechoslovakia (in Prague we witness the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich), Poland (where Ginger and Cary are mistaken for Polish Jews and, in a darkly solemn scene unlike anything else in the movie, they're to be deported to a death camp while we hear mournful Jewish hymns sung in the distance), Norway (staying with the Quislings, naturally), Holland (crash!), Belgium (ka-boom!), and finally on to Paris where Ginger becomes an American spy. "Mata O'Hara," says Grant-- a comic highlight.Hilarity does not ensue, but patriotism does, up to and including Ginger reciting the entire Pledge of Allegiance.A screwball comedy peppered with genuine Nazi atrocities. And I thought I'd seen it all from Hollywood.