Reviewing it in the New York Times, Bosley Crowther called I Want a Divorce “a banal and dreary sort of preachment about the heartbreak of divorce.” He’s not wrong, but I’m still curious as to why so heavy-handed and poorly executed an anti-divorce melodrama was made by Paramount at this time, with Joan Blondell and Dick Powell as the leads. I expect it was intended as a sop to the Catholic Legion of Decency: the movie even features a fishmonger (named Gillman, ha) who shows up every Friday for Blondell and Powell’s fish dinner. But I don’t know enough about censorship pressures in 1940 to say for sure how this movie was supposed to purchase goodwill for the studio or its stars.
Jerry and Mac (Blondell and Powell), having met at the divorce trial of Jerry’s sister Wanda, fall in love and get married. They both deplore Wanda’s frivolous decision to seek a divorce from her kind and decent husband, and Blondell makes Powell, who is about to pass his bar exam, promise never to take a divorce case. However, when money is tight he breaks his promise and goes to work in a divorce firm. His career takes off, but Blondell is unhappy: “Every time I see Mac’s name in print associated with the break-up of somebody’s home I get sick to my stomach.”
A few years into their marriage, they go through a rough patch and, when tempers rise, decide to divorce. Wanda, now remorseful over the loss of her marriage and her sense of estrangement from her young son, urges her sister to reconcile. “I wrecked my life, Jerry,” she says. “Don’t let it happen to you.” But Blondell refuses to listen to this counsel—until Wanda, learning that her ex-husband has remarried, commits suicide.
Her daughter’s body not even cold, Wanda’s mother (who dispenses traditional marital wisdom throughout the film) calmly delivers a speech to her surviving daughter: “When Wanda divorced David she broke a promise she made to the Lord God Almighty….She stubbornly set on making her own bed. Well, she made it. And right now she’s lying in it….Jerry, she’d say, don’t do what I did to my man. Make a fight for him.” Okay, mom! Powell and Blondell reconcile and he changes jobs to work at a family conciliation court, saving marriages rather than ending them. At the end, they head off to their Friday fish dinner.
There is evidently some connection to a radio show of the time called “I Want a Divorce,” which ran on NBC prior to the movie and on the rival Mutual network after. Each episode consisted of a half-hour drama about marital strife, and Blondell was a recurring player in the Mutual series. It seems possible that the movie was intended to capitalize on whatever success the radio show had. The Mutual show opener runs:
“Judge, I want a divorce!” “Divorce granted!”
“Judge, I want a divorce!” “Divorce granted!”
“Judge, I want a divorce!” “Divorce granted!”
“I want a divorce!” “I want a divorce!” “I want a divorce!”
Faster, faster, ever faster does the divorce mill grind away yesteryear's happiness! “Why? Why? Why?” ask millions!Listen to I Want a Divorce, the copyrighted program approved by many leaders of church and state. The program that dramatizes the real life happenings in other people's marriages.
Blondell and Powell were married in real life at the time they made the film I Want a Divorce, but divorced in 1944. This was the second marriage of each. Blondell’s third husband was producer Mike Todd who, after Blondell divorced him on grounds of mental cruelty, would become the third husband of the much-married Elizabeth Taylor. The actress playing Wanda married the film’s director the year after its production; they divorced in 1944. Gillman the fishmonger is played by comedian Frank Fay, the first husband of Barbara Stanwyck (they divorced in 1935, his second divorce). The story credit for the film goes to then world-famous reporter and writer Adela Rogers St. Johns, divorced three times, and the screenwriter was divorced twice.
Faster, faster, ever faster.