Unfinished Business (Universal) is a title with a meaning, i.e., every woman has some unfinished business in her life. In the life of Nancy Adams (Irene Dunne) it is a premarital romance with her husband's elder brother (Preston Foster). Until she makes her husband (Robert Montgomery) accept its significance, their marriage is a bust.
In the hands of a lesser director than Gregory La Cava (My Man Godfrey, Stage Door) this theme might well have turned sour. By superb cinema artistry he raises it to the level of subtle, entertaining comedy without losing sight of its basic problem. That tour de force is a rare cinema triumph.
Much of the charm of Unfinished Business is its lack of what passes for acting in Hollywood. For the most part, its characters are just people—people that any cinemagoer would be likely to meet and know. So human and natural are the principals that they are scarcely recognizable from their former cinema roles.
Unfinished Business is a mosaic of wisely done camera sequences. Irene Dunne, a small-town Midwestern voice teacher, has come to Manhattan for adventure and a career. Saddened by her unrequited love for Foster, a wealthy wolf, she flunks her operatic try out. As she departs, she is told that her voice is good, that there must be a place for it somewhere. In a flick of the camera lens she is singing happy-birthday messages into a telephone from a telegraph office.
Once established, this comic mood splits the plot wide open. Billy Ross (Walter Catlett), nightclub impresario, gets a birthday greeting from Miss Dunne, orders her to report for rehearsals. Another switch, and in a wonderfully nonsensical scene he hires her to be his lyrical phone girl.
What sets Unfinished Business in a class by itself is the fact that it is truly a moving picture—not just photographed talk, or a photographed play, or a travelogue with actors. It is a product devised for the special talents of the movie camera.
The ability to make extremely good motion pictures has long belonged to George Gregory La Cava, a grizzled, balding, vigorous little man with an irrepressible fund of humor, a fierce integrity, and an unholy belligerence that has kept him in hot water most of his life. He made his first feature picture (Restless Wives, with Doris Kenyon and Edna May Oliver) 17 years ago at the Astoria Studios on Long Island.
But the right to make his kind of pictures without studio interference was a long time coming for La Cava. Famed was his feud with the late Irving Thalberg. Accustomed to being consulted before each day's shooting, Thalberg was furious when his new director ignored his calls to counsel. When the irate producer arrived on the set, the director, warned of his coming, was placidly practicing golf shots while his actors rehearsed themselves. The conversation was brief:
Thalberg: "Why haven't you been up to see me?"
La Cava: "Why should I?"
Thalberg: "I don't like the way this scene is being handled."
La Cava: "O.K., you direct it."