Katharine Hepburn was a fast talker and fabulous with comedy scripts that called for rapid-fire banter. So was Bette Davis. On the male side, Spencer Tracy, Cary Grant and Fred MacMurray were among the best at ping-pong repartee. All knew their lines cold but also their co-star's. Once on camera, they could turn scenes into saucy exchanges.
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Another actress who was terrific in this department and vastly underrated was Ann Sheridan (above). She started out in Hollywood in the late 1930s in films with James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart. In 1939, a Warner Bros. promotion announced that Sheridan had been voted by a committee of 25 men as the actress with the most "oomph" in America. She became known colloquially as the "Oomph Girl." She had mastered the art of seamless dialogue by knowing the last word of her co-star's line. This technique gave her lines a realistic freshness, a naturalism that sounded almost improvised rather than memorized.
For me, many of Cary Grant's films today are weighed down by lumbering scripts or are worn out, largely because they've been viewed so often. However, one of my favorites remains I Was a Male War Bride (1949), co-starring Ann Sheridan. The two of them together were magic, nearly as fast as Grant (above) and Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby (1938).
Directed by Howard Hawks (above), War Bride was based on an article that first appeared in the Baltimore Sun by Henri Rochard, the pen name of Roger Charlier, a Belgian resistance fighter who married an American nurse while still abroad after the war.
For the film, the story was reworked. Grant plays Rochard, a French army captain in post-war Germany who needs to travel to Bad Nauheim. Tasked with taking him by motorcycle and sidecar is Sheridan (as Lieutenant Catherine Gates). The problem is they have unpleasant history together. For the rest, you'll have to watch the film.
Sheridan became a major co-star in the 1940s and beyond but never achieved household-name status the way Hepburn and Davis did. In 1966, she began starring in a new TV Western-themed comedy series, Pistols 'n' Petticoats but became ill during the taping. She died of esophageal cancer in 1967. She was just 51.
Here's I Was a Male War Bride (1949), which you can expand to full screen...
