Her Favorite Husband is a curiosity in the career of elegant Italian director Mario Soldati, as his first English language film during an era when his country's industry was reaching out with foreign co-productions.Part of the awkwardness of the gangster comedy may be his uncertainty with the British crew and cast. Strangely it uses an old trope, a look alike whose identity is confused with the other he resembles, that Soldati had tried once before in his 1939 Dora Nelson, a remake of a 1935 French comedy.
The implausibility of the device is stretched further when the gangster's former girlfriend lands up getting a household job, without her knowing, in the apartment of the same look alike, the bank clerk.
A promising opening scene in a customs line with that old scene stealer Margaret Rutherford displaying outrage at petty invasions of her dignity later gives way to a silly slapstick style sequence in the apartment with various characters running in and out of rooms hitting each other.
But (a big but) the noir like gangster mood while not taken seriously on the script or acting levels is beautifully evoked in the lensing of later cult horror auteur Mario Bava. Soldati worked with him to wrap settings in rich shadows and to heighten a sense of depth with sharply focused backgrounds and perspective staging. In this formal aspect at least the mise en scene yields much pleasure.