From 1939 to 1943, Rosalind Russell never once played a domestic character. The closest to it were her ‘39 movies, Fast and Loose and The Women, where at least she’s married. But FaL has her as part of a husband-wife detective team, and in The Women she’s more of a socialite. Here and in Design for Scandal, she plays unusually accomplished women who have made their own wealth by succeeding in a man’s domain. The similarity here is to Katharine Hepburn, who also played luminous people (a pilot in Christopher Strong; a diplomatic superstar in Woman of the Year). It’s wrong, though, to call Ros a poor-man’s Kate, even if they seem interchangeable (and lookit, I’d love it if Ros had one of Kate’s Oscars)

Like the movies Kate made with Cary Grant and Spencer Tracy, Take a Letter, Darling is part of the battle-of-the-sexes genre. In this case, Fred MacMurray is emasculated by Ros when she makes him her secretary, even though really he’s basically a beard. No, there’s not a lot of sapphic overtones: it’s just that Ros has to present herself as having a man in order to win accounts for her advertising firm, and Fred is her exasperated sidekick. There’s no small degree of Don Draper in Ros’ “A.M. MacGregor.” The joke is that all the men she hires to be her sidepiece fall for her, and Fred falls in line too.

It's fun to see Fred, one of my all-time favorites, being the himbo. It’s not a role he got to play often – he lacked the implicit glamour of some of his contemporaries (Henry Fonda or Robert Taylor or Tyrone Power, for instance) and was the studio system’s idea of an average-looking, unsophisticated guy. That’s ridiculous: MacMurray is handsome as an underwear-model, but he usually played guys who had to scheme to get the girl.

What’s fun about the movie is how mad he gets at Ros’ sharklike, savvy corporate player, and how she keeps putting him in situations he doesn’t want to be in. Their eye-brow wars may be the best you’ll ever see: these may be the four best eyebrows in the history of cinema. The plot turns when they put their act on for an old money southern brother-sister combo who fall for our duo, and then gets pretty sentimental when I was hoping it would go more for the screwball. Still, you can see the two falling for each other even though the film posits that their rich, highbrow opposites are the prizes that they end up rejected (Constance Moore is indeed quite a beauty; Macdonald Carey plays a William Powell type).

The movie ends on a weird note which I won’t spoil (familiar trajectory: Ros is “humanized”), but Ros seems in on the joke. To what should be no one’s surprise Mitchell Leisen made good movies.