Wonderfully offbeat film!

everything you have heard about this movie is true.

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

Norma Shearer's last film is a breezy romantic comedy directed with precision by Cukor and brought to life by a marvelous cast, including George Sanders and Robert Taylor, all pros in the romantic comedy department. The script is full of amusing observations on the complicated nature of power and pride in relationships. The sharp, witty lines uttered by Taylor and Sanders make for quite a few chuckles, as do the scenes of broad situational comedy, one of which has Taylor dangling off a balcony, and another involves Taylor and Shearer battling viciously one minute and caressing each other the next! Of course, it's all farce and not to be taken seriously, which probably made it seem dated at the time of release, but the theme is compelling and the finished product just plain fun. Shearer, in particular, gives a full-bodied comedic performance and has many funny moments. Never did she look more radiant and glamorous than she does here, ironically her final film, when it is clear she could have continued acting successfully for at least another decade!

Norma Shearer plays a woman on the rebound from a bad love affair. She meets a man (Robert Taylor) who has been following her around a casino. He finally gets the nerve to talk to her and blurt out I LOVE YOU. She is, of course, repulsed. By chance he runs into a man (George Sanders) desperate to get a note to a woman. When Taylor hears who it is (Shearer) he offers to pass the note. Silly on a certain level, the the 3 stars are so good you forget the obvious machinations of the script and just watch 3 pros at work.Sanders still loves Shearer who might love Sanders but Taylor loves Shearer as she is interested. Forget the plot Taylor is a sing writer with Frank McHugh and Shearer is guarded over by maid Elizabeth Patterson. Lots of fun with many funny lines.For some reason this was a huge bomb when released in 1942 and it ended Norma Shearer's 22-year film career. It's not even a bad movie! She looks great and gives a lively and funny performance. Taylor is also in top form.Certainly worth a look

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.

What a delight! Robert Taylor is hired by Norma Shearer to be her Cardboard Lover to make her real love, George Sanders jealous. Taylor has been in love with Shearer but has never even spoken to her, too afraid to be rejected. When he finally speaks, he says "I love you" which makes Shearer think he is crazy. Later in the casino he loses $3000 dollars of which he has none, and he is employed by her to work off the debt. George Sanders is a cad but she is in love, and tells Taylor he is never to leave her alone, so that she can rid her mind of Sanders. Every time she tries to get to Sanders, he is there, in the hall, in the bedroom, on the balcony, eating a banana outside the door, totally insane. In one scene when Sanders comes to her bedroom to tell her they can be together if she accepts him as is, Taylor comes out of the bathroom in her pajamas with fluffy slippers and all, and hops into her bed, sending Sanders into a rage. Very, very funny indeed. They argue, he has a fist fight with Sanders, they wind up in jail, but in the end she realizes that it was Taylor all along that she loves, and all ends well. This film comes on the heels of "Johnny Eager" in which Taylor had the best of all roles as the sociopath gangster. Talk about versatility, they should never have sold this great actor short. He could play comedy or drama just as well. The teaming of Shearer and Taylor was their second, coming after "Escape" a pre war drama about Nazi Germany. They are great together, and it is a shame that this film was Shearers last film.