This is one of those patented situation comedies that are repeatedly used in the movies or television. So and so has a job, and his boss is a believer in the sanctity of marriage. Somehow the boss learns that so and so is married, and has a nice marriage. When he gets an opportunity, the boss invites so and so and his wife to spend the weekend at his home...which panics so and so because he really is not married, but circumstances (ah, those perennial circumstances) have led to his having claimed he was married. Now his job and his future are on the line...what should he do?
Why, borrow the wife of his best friend, of course!
Variations appear everywhere: Christmas IN CONNECTICUT, for instance, has Barbara Stanwyck usurping the home of her friend Reginald Gardiner to impress her sanctimonious boss Sydney Greenstreet (who has another great "rounded" fat name - Alexander Yardley). On television a failed series in the middle 1960s was OCCASIONAL WIFE, which had an executive in a baby food company requiring a fake wife for the happiness of his employer. He uses his neighbor two floors beneath his apartment (the hero and heroin frequently have to meet on the fire escape of the apartment between theirs, leading to a running joke of the reaction of the man who owns that apartment. About the same time Jack Lemmon made his film GOOD NEIGHBOR SAM, where a married man has to help his neighbor (Romy Schneider) inherit her wealth by pretending he is her husband (Mike Connors). Connors reciprocates by pretending to be married to Lemmon's real wife Connie Stevens (leading to some complicated incidents of both men purposely making each other jealous -and almost driving neighbor Robert Q. Lewis crazy in the process).
Despite it's repetitive use it is not a bad plot, and in GUEST WIFE it was well handled. Here Ameche is a reporter for a newspaper - magazine chain, who has had to make up his marriage to make his copy more relevant. It has made Ameche a major news figure, and his boss (Charles Dingle, pleasantly using his pompous threatening characterization to comic use - and quite well) wants to meet the little woman, who behaved so bravely in the Far East. As Ameche has based her on Claudette Colbert (the wife of his best friend Dick Foran), he goes to Foran to get permission to borrow Claudette for a few hours (for dinner with Dingle). Foran is willing, but Colbert is tired of the number of times Ameche has somehow manipulated Foran into doing things for Ameche that were not in the interest of either Foran and Colbert.
But she goes along, until she finds that Dingle has become more plans for them in the coming weekend. Ameche, for fears for his job, willingly expands the time that Colbert is with him, but this slowly gets the formerly subservient Foran to resent his friend more and more. This leads to some nice pieces of comedy with hotel detective Grant Mitchell and with nosy neighbor Chester Clute. And Colbert, sensing an opportunity she won't miss, takes advantage of the situation to keep turning up the heat on a flustered Ameche. It turns out to be a nice little comedy, well worth viewing and even watching again.
