5/10
Ginger's Cold Feet
16 July 2008
By 1947 the screwball comedies of the Thirties had run their cycle as people wanted a bit more realism. In It Had To Be You, Ginger Rogers plays another dizzy rich heiress who gets cold feet every time she comes up for the moment of truth before the 'I Dos' are said. Well at least she's saving those four prospective husbands a lot of potential alimony.

In this case it's hapless heir Ron Randell she's made number four. And this marriage is important to Randell's father, Thurston Hall who wants the millions of Rogers's parents Percy Waram and Spring Byington for his own business.

Her ideal man who she conceptualizes is Cornel Wilde and he appears to her in her sleeper car stateroom on a train and springs to life, in an Indian suit. And he won't leave her until she realizes what she subconsciously wants.

Later on Wilde appears to her as a blue collar fireman and it's a whirlwind courtship indeed.

It Had To Be You seems to be based on taking the performance of Ginger Rogers as Liza Elliott in Lady in the Dark which she had done for Paramount a few years earlier. That one also of course involved dream sequences and fantasies. But the idea really went off the track in this film.

I'm sure the fact that the Isham Jones-Gus Kahn song from the Twenties, It Had To Be You was enjoying a revival at the time via a hit record made by Dick Haymes and Helen Forrest certainly inspired the title of this film. The song is heard throughout the film.

Cornel Wilde showed a certain flair for comedy and he certainly didn't get parts like these too often in his career. Sad to say though that the film while funny in spots seems to run out of gas well before the finish.
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