Ralph Bellamy as the Unwanted Fiance (A 2-Film Comparison)

            Nobody wants to marry Ralph Bellamy. After watching lots of Old Hollywood films you start to think, "hey, that guy's been in everything!" And in most major films he's been in, he plays the same character - the "unwanted fiance," the second-best option when the protagonist can't be with their true love. Take Carefree, for instance. Ralph Bellamy's character is going to marry Ginger Rogers, but as soon as Fred Astaire enters the picture, we know he doesn't have a chance. Or His Girl Friday - do we ever want Ralph Bellamy to marry Rosalind Russell? Not when she could re-marry Cary Grant, we don't.

            Ralph Bellamy, born in 1904, had an incredibly long and successful screen career. Beginning in 1931 with the Pre-Code drama The Secret Six (also featuring Jean Harlow and Clark Gable), Bellamy didn't stop working until his final film appearance in Pretty Woman in 1990. Yes, the Julia Roberts Pretty Woman. Highlights of his filmography include comedies like Dance, Girl, Dance and Hands Across the Table, and the series of four films in which Bellamy portrayed Ellery Queen, famous detective-hero of the '30s and '40s.

            Here we're focusing on two of Bellamy's biggest successes career-wise, which happen to be his biggest fails character-wise. He's engaged two times and married none over the course of two pictures: Carefree and His Girl Friday.

Carefree (1938)

Ginger Rogers as Amanda Cooper

Engaged to: Ralph Bellamy

Marries: Fred Astaire

            Carefree is a Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movie in the sense that it stars both of them, not in the musical-number-a-minute sense that Swing Time and Top Hat share. At its heart, Carefree is a screwball comedy, and it's a great one.

            The movie starts off with a drunken Stephen Arden (Ralph Bellamy) arriving at a psychiatrist's office. The psychiatrist happens to be his good friend Tony Flagg (Fred Astaire, in a rare departure from playing a dancer). Stephen tells the doctor that he's engaged to marry Amanda Cooper, but she keeps breaking the engagement. Is there anything Dr. Flagg could do, like maybe, psychoanalyze Amanda for him? Carefree itself echoes Freud and the craze for psychoanalysis that was sweeping Hollywood at the time. To modern viewers it seems a little insane, but the 1938 audience probably thought it was the peak of comedy.

            Tony inadvertently insults Amanda by diagnosing her as a "dizzy, silly, maladjusted female", then tries to explain all his medical revelations: "You know that you have two minds: the conscious and the subconscious. The conscious mind is the ego. That's the thing that says 'I am I, and you are you.'" To which Amanda replies "Mine never said that," and leaves in frustration.

            The rest of the film, Amanda switches in and out of hypnosis, while realizing that she's actually in love with Tony. The best bit of comedic acting in the movie is when Tony tells Amanda there's nothing further he can do for her, but she wants to keep seeing him, so she makes up a dream to convince him she's crazy. Sometimes she believes she loves Stephen, and their engagement is announced and the wedding date set. Then Tony has to un-hypnotize Amanda, since he's fallen in love with her and wants to know how she really feels. This leads to a really beautiful dance number called "Change Partners" in which Ginger Rogers dances like she's in a trance the whole time.

            Stephen eventually catches on that his fiancee doesn't love him anymore, and it's his fault for having her psychoanalyzed in the first place. At Amanda's wedding to Stephen, Tony arrives and knocks Stephen out. Then he knocks out Amanda in order to remind her subconscious that she's really in love with Tony. Marriage-phobia cured, and psyche straightened out, Amanda walks down the aisle - with Tony!

His Girl Friday (1940)

Rosalind Russell as Hildy Johnson

Engaged to: Ralph Bellamy

Marries: Cary Grant

             His Girl Friday broke the record for fastest on-screen dialogue - lose focus for one second and you might miss a whole conversation. 

            As the film begins, Hildy Johnson is arriving at her old job, the newspaper office for The Morning Post. Once the office's best reporter, she's about to settle down with a new husband, insurance salesman Bruce Baldwin (Ralph Bellamy). From the moment Hildy walks into the office of fellow reporter and Hildy's ex-husband Walter Burns (Cary Grant), any hope for Bruce disappears. Hildy and Walter have a hilarious, witty, chemistry-full reminiscence about their marriage. Never one to give up, Walter invites himself to lunch with the engaged couple and tries to convince Hildy to come back to the newspaper business. (Asked to describe Bruce, Walter says "He looks like that fellow in the movies, you know... Ralph Bellamy!" - an ad-lib by Cary Grant!).

            Eventually, on the condition that Walter buy insurance from Bruce, she agrees to cover one last story - the murder trial of Earl Williams. As soon as Hildy is back on the job, Walter tries everything in the book to get her to stay there. He frames Bruce for stealing, landing him in jail. Hildy bails her fiance out, becomes (understandably) frustrated with Walter, and vows to quit. Just then, Earl Williams escapes and a wild chase breaks out. Walter somehow finds time to jail Bruce... again. Williams winds up in the newsroom and Hildy and Walter hide him in a roll-top desk while the police search the room. 

            Caught up in the thrill of it all, Hildy throws herself back into her work and starts writing an article. She barely notices when Bruce arrives, sees that his chances are hopeless, and leaves on the train. Walter re-proposes to Hildy, who accepts gladly, and they plan their honeymoon at the site of a newsworthy workers' strike.

            Though this article only focused on two, there are even more films where Ralph Bellamy plays a jilted side-love-interest to the main character. The Awful Truth, another Cary Grant comedy, has Bellamy potentially going to marry Irene Dunne, playing Cary's ex. Do we really think Bellamy has a chance - or do we ever?