I Was a Male War Bride

I Was a Male War Bride (1949) is Howard Hawks' service comedy with Cary Grant and Ann Sheridan, ready to watch online on iFILM. In occupied postwar Germany, French captain Henri Rochard gets paired on assignment with U.S. Army lieutenant Catherine Gates — the very woman he can't stand to be near, or stay away from.

Their superiors send the bickering pair across the countryside on a captured motorcycle with a sidecar. The trip is one disaster after another, and somewhere between the breakdowns and the shouting they admit they're in love. So they marry. That's when the real trouble starts: to follow his wife home, Henri has to enter the States under the War Brides Act — which means the army processes him, on paper, as a war bride.

Hawks builds the whole thing out of bureaucratic absurdity, with Grant playing half the film in drag and a perfectly straight face. It was one of the studio's biggest earners that year. Fast, light and surprisingly cheeky for 1949. Stream I Was a Male War Bride (1949) online on iFILM.