Age of Indiscretion (1935)
A divorced couple go to court over custody of a little boy named Billy? Sounds like Kramer vs. Kramer. But this B movie is a 1935 Paul Lukas vehicle. Lukas plays a principled book publisher whose wife, when she learns that a sales slump is going to force her to economize, leaves him for a wealthy playboy with whom she has already been dallying prior to her Reno divorce.
Despite Lukas’s soft-spoken Hungarian accent, his son shouts his lines in a Huck Finn twang. (Child actor David Holt would have a more suitable role a few years later in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.) The spoiled ex-wife doesn’t want custody, but her new husband’s dowager mother controls the purse strings, and she wants a grandchild to brighten her autumn years. “I want that boy!” the old lady shouts, and orders the ex-wife to demand full custody.
The case looks shaky for Lukas, especially since he was caught compromisingly in what was really an innocent Christmas morning romp in pajamas with his son and his pretty young secretary (Madge Evans). “You’re not quite as white as you pretend,” the ex-wife gloats, resenting his decency and eager to tarnish his reputation.
When the son bursts into tears at being taken from his father, the dowager finds her conscience, admits that the ex-wife has no actual interest in the boy, and contritely withdraws her case. For some reason she is not charged with perjury.
A forgettable movie, though I find it interesting that we are meant to side with Lukas although his motivation for custody is less than child-focused. “Billy’s the only thing I have,” he tells his ex-wife. “And I couldn’t stand the thought of him seeing you with another man, becoming part of another life in which I have no place.”
The Lady Consents (1936)
The natural enemy of the gold-digger is the noble ex-wife. And a good thing, too, for Herbert Marshall in this B-picture melodrama. Married Dr. Talbot (Marshall) becomes the romantic target of a ruthlessly competitive sportswoman dubbed “the Kansas Cyclone” (Margaret Lindsay), and not the magical Wizard of Oz kind, either.
Having pried the doctor away from his wife (Ann Harding), the Cyclone invites her to the wedding in order to rub her nose in her loss. She then quickly redesigns the Talbot home to suit her own taste, including the billiard room that is now a showcase for her sports trophies—not least, the doctor. Having bagged her game, she lets him know she married him for the status and will never give him a divorce. Meanwhile, she treats his friends, family, and medical patients as nuisances and pushes them out of his life.
Fortunately for the doctor, his ex-wife eventually decides it’s time for a rematch. There are a few twists along the way, a fatal rifle accident, and an unfortunate “dumb negro” scene with the misused Willie Best. But the resolution of the plot comes rather easily in the final few minutes. Harding pretends to increase her alimony demands. The Cyclone, who did not marry for love, is thereby convinced to divorce. She will surely win her own alimony competition, but the reunited Doctor and Mrs. Talbot do not seem to mind.
The movie glitters only in the scenes between Harding and Edward Ellis, who plays her (ex-)father-in-law, a tough and lovable old man who stays loyal to her even after she stoically tells him “I’m taking a little trip to Reno, Jim.” There’s a great moment in which he tries to comfort her, recognizing that she desperately needs to cry. “A few tears would help,” he tells her. She chokes out a stubborn syllable: “Can’t.” He then slaps her, and she is able to fall into his arms and sob.
But the most memorable thing about the movie is the prominence of a novelty at the time of the film’s making: beer in cans, first introduced in 1935. The actors drink it, remark on it, and are surprised that it’s just as good as the stuff in bottles.
Snowed Under (1936)
Another B movie in which a noble ex-wife saves the day, this one is a drawing room farce set in a winter cabin surrounded by heaps of fake snow that never melts even when it blows indoors.
A celebrated playwright (George Brent, divorced four times) is stuck on the last act of a Broadway play set to go up in a week. He can only finish the play if his original wife—she divorced him, after which he had a “rebound” marriage to a music hall floozy, whom he also divorced—takes up her old role as his typist, housekeeper, and uncredited creative partner.
It is in his interest to finish the play as he currently owes hundreds of dollars in back alimony to his second ex-wife. It is less clear why his smiling first wife (Genevieve Tobin) agrees, at the pleading of the producers, to get her ex-husband’s life in order again.
Lucky for him, she does, showing up at his winter cabin, soon joined by: the alimony-seeking second wife, the second wife’s lawyer, a college girl infatuated with the playwright, and the local deputy sheriff who is supposed to arrest the playwright but gets distracted by a large jug of apple jack. Simmer and stir.
The cast is fine, from Tobin (with her fascinatingly symmetrical, African mask face), to the second ex-wife Glenda Farrell as tough cookie, to dependable comic Frank McHugh as the deputy sheriff. But the movie is a labored vaudeville routine. Brent and Tobin are reunited from the get-go, so we are left with snow drift gags to fill up the time.
Libeled Lady (1936)
Now for a good movie. Released two years after William Powell and Myrna Loy showed audiences how much fun marriage could be in The Thin Man (at least if both husband and wife are capable of drinking six martinis in an eyeblink), Libeled Lady is, according to James Harvey in Romantic Comedy in Hollywood from Lubitsch to Sturges, “the most delightful comedy of all the Powell-and-Loy films.”
Wealthy heiress Loy is the nut too tough to crack, even for expert ladies’ man Powell, who has been hired by newspaperman Spencer Tracy to seduce Loy and compromise her reputation so that she will call off her five million dollar suit of the paper after it ran a libelous story about her.
At the start, though, Tracy is accosted by Jean Harlow in full wedding dress, apoplectic that he has stood her up on their wedding day. Newspapermen in these movies are always people (and not always men—see His Girl Friday) for whom the paper comes first and family life comes second. Tracy has a problem (Loy’s suit) on his hands that requires a nuclear option. He strong-arms his fiancée into marrying Powell, so that Powell can canoodle with Loy and then get “caught” by “jealous wife” Harlow. A Reno divorce afterwards will make everything okay, he promises.
But Loy as a mark may prove beyond even Powell’s abilities. James Harvey again:
Powell’s Bill Chandler is the consummate man-about town, the ultimate smoothie—guaranteed, according to Haggerty [Tracy], to “meet anybody in the world, from Gandhi to Garbo.” He can handle the Harlow and Tracy characters with almost no hitch at all; but confronted with Loy, he is suddenly reduced to snubs on the dance floor, prat-falls in a trout stream (one of the great slapstick routines of the decade), and the humiliating experience of having to manipulate and deceive three separate people at once.
Loy indeed chews up the endlessly affable Powell. But instead of spitting him out, the two of them fall in love—and get married.
But isn’t Powell already legally married to Harlow? Harlow certainly thinks so, and has grown quite fond of Powell, certainly in comparison with the unreliable Tracy. She has already been left at the altar by one man, why should she give up this one?
Well, says Powell, his marriage to Harlow was never legal, since Harlow had been married previously and obtained a “Yucatan divorce,” and “three years ago, all Yucatan divorces were declared illegal.” Not so fast, Harlow says: “I found out my Yucatan divorce was not good, so I got a second divorce . . . in Reno.” At this point, both marriage and divorce seem to have the firmness of pull taffy.
In the end, Loy convinces Harlow to relent, divorce Powell, and give Tracy another chance. “You can’t build a life on hate or a marriage on spite,” Loy says. “Marriage is too important.”
But which kind of marriage, the durable or the temporary, the real or the cynical? And how can you tell which is which—unless you are William Powell and Myrna Loy?
My mom and I just watched Libeled Lady. What a great film. And I can see why it wasn’t included in the divorce films course - there’s no divorce. It’s all about the chase! Thanks for the recommendation.