In the scene where Grant is playing his saxophone, Miss Rogers loses control and starts laughing hysterically. What is she laughing at? Is it the tune Grant is playing? And what tune is it?
shareI don't know the tune, but I am assuming this is the scene where Grant has just left Rogers' car in the train. He knows that her husband will be back, after dealing with the money mishap, and doesn't want them fooling around because Grant is jealous and likes her. She knows he does and likes him too, so she just laughs at it all.
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Danernest's explanation is the same thing I was thinking. I think he was trying to spoil the mood, and make it as unromantic as possible for them, because he obviously liked Kathie. ;D
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Yes, that's me...Little miss Lee...
I watched this scene twice and don't have any good answers. One wild guess might be that Grant's character on his saxophone isn't playing a recognizable melody at all, but just discordant musical noise, calculated to annoy Slezak's character & to frustrate's Slezak's romantic intentions toward Rogers' character. (Grant succeeds in this intent!)
As to Rogers' uncontrollable laughter, we could make another wild guess. Director McCarey did use plenty of unscripted improvization in his scenes, some of which worked beautifully -- while others emerged as a confusing hodge-podge that made little sense in a completed film. (Director Gregory LaCava's improvized films were similar.) Possibly in this scene, if it was improvized, McCarey merely suggested that Rogers laugh uncontrollably -- which she did. But, later, when editor Theron Warth spliced the completed scenes together, all he had was Grant's character making noise on his saxophone, so Warth had no other choice but to join those 2 scenes together (saxophone & laughter), whether it made any sense, or not...
Maybe someone else has much better explanations? -- Prof Steven P Hill, Cinema Studies, University of Illinois "S(DASH)HILL4(AT)UIUC(DOT)EDU"
It occurs to me--it hadn't occured to me before you asked your question, s00davis--that Cary Grant's pretending to be a saxophonist and his inept saxophone playing were a few of the pieces of the jigsaw he's trying to put together of Ginger's past. That would be their shared past; he saw her in a burlesque show in New York which he couldn't forget nor completely remember (later he does remember her real name).
The movie is also about not pretending to be who one isn't: so there's a kind of logic that Ginger should laugh when something of her real past comes back to her out of the blue (at a crucial moment of pretence: she and her con man husband baron are about to coucher ensemble).
While I think my idea here is right, they didn't entirely bring it off in the film--for one thing, no one commenting here got it.