This Thing Called Love (1940)

This Thing Called Love extracts its laughs from the prehistoric concept of sexual frustration. Business partners Rosalind Russell and Melvyn Douglas marry, but only on a trial basis. Russell wants to prove that a married couple can function merely as friends, and to that end she denies her husband access to the conjugal bed for three months. By the time she's ready, he isn't, having contacted a vicious case of poison oak. All experimentation dissolves by the fade-out, when Russell and Douglas surrender to the passions that have been smouldering from the outset. This Thing Called Love is a remake of the 1929 film of the same name, which starred Constance Bennett and Edmund Lowe.