For some reason, Dunne's elderly father-in-law, Charles Coburn, also lives with Dunne and Freeman. Because it's a movie, Coburn is obsessed with Dunne resigning her position as mayor and snagging a husband. It appears that just about any husband will do for Coburn, if not for Dunne.
A lightning bold removes the head of the statue of Dunne's late husband. Freeman insists on replacing the statue with another that is bigger and better. As mayor, Dunne is tasked with traveling to the big city to hire a sculptor willing to come to Brookhaven for the duration. The sculptor turns out to be Charles Boyer, and he is smitten with Dunne at first sight.
Their first date is disastrous, but that doesn't stop Boyer from making a trip to Brookhaven to build the statue. Coburn is delighted that Dunne has a suitor, and insists that Boyer stay on his property during construction. Freeman develops a crush on Boyer, and adopts pretensions that frustrate her lanky and long-suffering boyfriend, Jerome Courtland.
The family's elderly maid is Elizabeth Patterson. Charles Dingle plays a grumpy local newspaper publisher who seeks to replace Dunne as mayor.
How others will see it. It was not the first time that Dunne and Boyer were the romantic leads in a film. Love Affair (1939) was a critical and commercial success, and is by far the best known of their mutual movies. When Tomorrow Comes (1939) was released shortly thereafter and was mostly forgotten. Thus the title of our present film, Together Again is actually a tagline reference to Love Affair, instead of the customary glimpse into the plot.
Together Again is much more of a comedy than Love Affair. And it is loved less, then and now. While Love Affair had six Oscar nominations at the insanely competitive 1940 Academy Awards, Together Again was never nominated for any awards. At imdb.com, the user vote total (600) and user rating (6.7) are both significantly less than Love Affair. But women enjoy it somewhat more than do men, based on their respective user ratings of 7.1 and 6.6.
The user reviews, though, are mostly positive. Most reviewers have seen a great many classic Hollywood films, and enjoy watching the three familiar leads. Many point out the plot's similarity with The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer, which was made a few years later in 1947. Though Cary Grant would probably wince at a romantic comparison with Charles Boyer, the inspiration for the incurably romantic Pepé Le Pew of the 1950s Warner Bros. cartoons.
How I felt about it. Together Again also reminds me of Late Spring (1949), a highly regarded Japanese drama. In that film, the pretty daughter of an aging widower is pressured by her aunt to marry now already to this guy over here. Because by all means a beautiful woman must be married, and she should forget about such foolishness as remaining town mayor.
As the film progresses, I felt a growing unease that Dunne would eventually cave into the pressure heaped on her by Boyer and Coburn, and would be stuck unemployed and without family as a neglected sculptor's wife in a city distant from Brookhaven. And no one, it seems, cares much about whether that would suit Dunne. My guess is no, it would not, even if Boyer doesn't eventually bed Dunne's comely and impressionable young daughter.
So, I for one hope for a remake of the movie where, in the final reel, Dunne tells everyone off and sends both Boyer and Coburn packing while continuing to serve as Brookhaven mayor.
Although the ending is thus unsatisfactory, there is admittedly much humor in the first two-thirds of the picture. Dunne is left holding the bag at a strip club, an unlikely but hilarious outcome for such a classy dame. Freeman's dullsville piano recital has amusing interruptions by her own family, who are more interested in manipulating each other. And Courtland makes a big impression in his film debut, despite the burden of the catch phrase "good night" in nearly every line.