I am looking for the title of a movie. A woman goes overboard, presumed dead. Married with two children. Movie cuts to 7years later in court. Judge declares her legally dead. Husband returns home to hotel (maybe) to prepare for wedding to another woman later that week/end. Original wife gets out of a truck having had amnesia and finally remembered who she was. She is recognized by the housekeeper but not the husband. She pretends to be a maid and eventually the husband finds out who she is. He is then torn between his original wife and the fiancée.
Maybe Move Over, Darling? The plot of that 1963 screwball comedy is very similar. Doris Day plays a wife and mother of two little girls who is lost at sea for five years. She is rescued the very day her husband (played by James Garner) appears in court to have her declared legally dead so he can marry his new girlfriend (played by Polly Bergen). Doris goes home, sees and talks to her two little girls (but doesn’t reveal that she is their mother). Her mother-in-law (played by Thelma Ritter) explains that Garner just remarried and is on his honeymoon. She urges Doris to rush to the hotel to stop her husband from consummating his new marriage. Doris confronts the shocked Garner at the hotel, and demands that he tell Bergen that the marriage is over. But Garner doesn’t know how to break the news and begs for more time. He fakes a serious back injury as an excuse to cancel the honeymoon, and the newlyweds return home. Doris pretends to be a Swedish nurse and moves into the house to look after Garner. The comedy escalates as Doris becomes more and more frustrated with Garner who cannot work up the courage to tell Polly that his first wife has returned from the dead. One of the comic highlights is a scene where Doris gives Polly one heck of a torturous “Swedish massage”. Things get even more complicated when Garner learns that Doris was not alone on the desert island. She was stranded all those years with a strapping young guy played by Rod Taylor, Adam to her Eve.
Move Over, Darling was a color remake of a B&W 1940’s film My Favorite Wife, that starred Cary Grant and Irene Dunne. If the movie you are looking for is B&W, then that may be it. The plots of both films are very similar. But the rescued wife does not have amnesia in either film.
My Favorite Wife was originally to be remade as Something’s Gotta Give with Marilyn Monroe and Dean Martin. It was Marilyn’s last film. She was a real mess during filming and was fired after they’d completed about a quarter of the filming. The studio later decided to rehire her and complete the film, but Marilyn died before shooting could resume. The studio waited a couple of years, then modified the script and cast Doris Day in the re-make. I’m pretty sure that a few years ago, they edited together some of the incomplete footage from the Marilyn Monroe film. I think I saw it on TCM.