Why does George Sanders always play the cad? I think he's very sexy, and this was the perfect role for him. Too bad Sanders was always cast as the cad/rival. I would like to have seen him as a romantic lead more often. Anyway Sanders and Shearer are delightful and very watchable in this film. They're both extremely talented actors, and the chemistry was believable. Shearer wasn't at her best, and didn't have much of a script to work with, but she proves she's one of the great movie stars - you simply cannot take your eyes off her. However, Taylor stole the show with his brilliant comedic expression and timing. He's a marvelous actor and used those eyebrows to their full potential in "Her Cardboard Lover". This is a very cute romantic romp of a film with some truly funny scenes.

This innocuous comedy that marked the farewell performance of Norma Shearer on the big screen has quite a history to it. It was a French play by Jacques Deval, adapted for the stage by P.G. Wodehouse among others. It ran for 152 performances in 1927 on Broadway and starred the legendary Jeanne Eagels with Leslie Howard.It then went to the silent screen the following year with Marion Davies and Nils Asther in the leads and scored a modicum of success there. But the most bizarre adaption was yet to come. In 1932 the story was reworked for Buster Keaton and Jimmy Durante in the The Passionate Plumber. Irene Purcell is the female lead. Which brings us to the last and least version of this story.I've a theory that Norma Shearer chose this vehicle to show Marion Davies that she could do one of her roles better. What other explanation could there be for turning down Mrs. Miniver as her farewell picture for this. And would you ever believe that Robert Taylor and Buster Keaton would play the same part on screen?Shearer and Davies were a pair of feuding stars at MGM while Davies was there. Shearer was married to the boss, Irving Thalberg and Davies had her patron William Randolph Hearst who bought his way on to the lot. It's now conceded that Davies had a real flair for comedy, but that Hearst just could only see her as the heroine of many a drama. Shearer was a great dramatic actress who never quite scored in comedy. I'm betting for her final film she was going to show the retired Davies that she could do it better.Well she didn't. In fact if any of P.G. Wodehouse's wit survived in this film, I must have dozed off. What emerges is a pleasant innocuous comedy which would have been long forgotten had it not been Norma Shearer's last film. When we first meet Shearer she's trying to fend off the advances of an amorous Taylor who has fallen in love at first sight. But later on she thinks he might be useful in fending off George Sanders's advances. She's trying real hard to dump the cad, but he's one charming rogue. So Norma hires Bob as Her Cardboard Lover to pretend he's the new man in her life. I think you can guess where this is going.Shearer did not get quite the sendoff from the big screen that she thought she would have gotten, surely not anything like Mrs. Miniver would have been. For Taylor, he's pleasant enough, but if you want to see him and Shearer in much better form look at the 1940 film Escape.

Even by 1942 standards of movie-making the setup which HER CARDBOARD LOVER presents was dated to the extreme. The machinations of one half of a pair (of husband/wife, ex-husband/ex-wife) to get the other back at the threat of marriage to another, divorce, or an eventual separation by means of jealousy, humiliation, or other schemes had been done much better in classics such as HIS GIRL Friday and THE PHILADELPHIA STORY. Both of these movies features women with a strong, indomitable screen presence and who played independent, proto-feminist characters. In both movies, both women were estranged/divorced from their (witty) first husbands and set to marry colorless men who were their exact opposite, and both would be bamboozled into rejecting their soon-to-be husbands and re-igniting their passion for each other.The plot in HER CARDBOARD LOVER switches the gender: here, it's Norma Shearer in the Cary Grant role out, this time, to ward off an ex-boyfriend (George Sanders) by means of hiring Robert Taylor to pose as her gigolo. The problem is, Shearer is much too old to be playing a role more suited to an actress in her mid-to-late twenties; Sanders is about as involved as a piece of furniture for the most -- any man who would be in love with his fiancée, on seeing a strange man come out of her bathroom as happens here, would knock the lights out of him and cause a huge scene. Not here. And Robert Taylor plays his part as if he were trying to channel Cary Grant half the time, not in speech inflections but in overall essence.But the worst part of it is Shearer herself. For an actress used to parts which gave her a sense of intellectual sexiness and dramatic presence, playing Consuelo Craydon seems to put her into throes of complete over-acting, over-emoting, and over-gesturing which, while still a part of her style of acting and more appropriate ten years earlier, makes her look like an extremely mannered performer wrenching the joke out of a situation like water from a fairly dry sponge. It only fuels the fires that tell the theory which gives Irving Thalberg the maker of her career and chooser of (most of her) roles; why she passed on roles such as Charlotte Vale and Mrs. Miniver on mega-hits NOW VOYAGER and MRS. MINIVER is a mystery, but then again, most accounts also state that by this time she had just burnt out from acting, that she'd had lost interest in the whole thing altogether and it's no secret that anyone who has experienced this sort of thing has essentially lost focus and can't wait until retirement or the end of a contract is near to leave as soon as possible. Such could be the case here. She seems lost, she seems tired, she seems ill at ease, going through autopilot instead of living the part. After this film she would make no more, but would be responsible of discovering Janet Leigh who would come into her own as a screen star during the late 40s and into the 60s.

I'm amazed at the difference of opinion on this one. I watched it and thought it so good that I checked Yahoo to get more info and was plain flabbergasted to see one star. It's better than Adams Rib as far as I am concerned. The comedic timing is letter perfect and Shearer, Taylor and Sanders are nothing short of brilliant and in that order. The lines are witty and the insanity of love is well and tartly limned and it knew exactly when to end and how to. Cukor knew how to handle this wonderful material and kudos for him. Now I have to find out who is responsible for the clever script. Less Shakespeare (Taming of the Shew or a Midsummer Nights Dream) it's the best light comedy I can remember seeing in a while.