Pre-Code Divorce Movie Round Up
The Rich Are Always With Us (1932), One Hour With You (1932), A Bill of Divorcement (1932), Smarty (1934), The Gay Divorcee (1934), Merry Wives of Reno (1934)
The Rich Are Always With Us (1932)
Ruth Chatterton plays the wealthiest heiress in the world, and also shows everyone how decent she can be when her husband leaves her for another woman. The twenty-three year old Bette Davis in a supporting role is the one who sets the heart aflutter here, but Chatterton’s character is a lesson in poise and class under trying circumstances. When her ex-husband is in the hospital after a car accident that kills his new wife, Chatterton sticks around to help care for him despite his past betrayal—but she also marries her new beau in the hospital. The movie is less of a tight narrative arc and more a loose bag of character studies, with a nice musical number sung by Virginia Verrill.
One Hour With You (1932)
“I have a theory that nobody is responsible for their actions.” This Ernst Lubitsch or George Cukor—there was considerable rancor over who really deserved the director credit—remake of Lubitsch’s earlier silent film The Marriage Circle pairs Jeanette MacDonald and Maurice Chevalier. It is, of course, sheer delight. Chevalier singing to the audience, or MacDonald’s face registering the significance of her husband’s acceptance of her slap, are things to behold. The husband and wife are deliriously happy together, but MacDonald’s divorcing friend Mitzi (Genevieve Tobin) is all too happy to introduce doubt and temptation into their marriage. Oh, that Mitzi! Songs composed by Leo Robin, who is best known for perhaps the greatest wistful post-divorce song ever, “Thanks for the Memory,” introduced in The Big Broadcast of 1938. (A future post, to be sure.)
A Bill of Divorcement (1932)
Cukor directs Katherine Hepburn’s debut in this adaptation of a 1921 play. Set in England, the grounds for the divorce of film’s title is that the husband (John Barrymore) is mentally ill and has been confined to an asylum for years. His wife has finally managed to secure the divorce which will allow her to marry the new man in her life, when Barrymore unexpectedly returns, his mental illness in precarious abeyance, and expects to find his wife still married to him. Hepburn plays the daughter, who had always been told that her father has shell shock, but now learns that his insanity runs in the family. This leads her to break off her own engagement, as she does not want to have children who may carry the illness, or inflict on her fiancé the care she would require if she succumbs to it herself. A tragedy only slightly sweetened by father and daughter’s willingness to care for each other in their shared predicament.
Smarty (1934)
At first one might watch this outrageous Joan Blondell film in high feminist dudgeon, thinking that it is a particularly extreme example of retrograde sexual politics and misogyny, teaching the audience that, as one character says, “A good sock in the eye is something every woman needs, at least once in her life.” The psychosexually feral Blondell (her eyes!) so relentlessly provokes and belittles her extraordinarily restrained husband during a game of bridge that he finally loses his self-control and, for the first time in their marriage, slaps her, rather to the amusement of their friends.
This becomes the pretext for her to divorce him, for the violence he has inflicted on “a tiny little woman, little more than a child,” as her hypocritically moralizing lawyer (the dependably milquetoast Edward Everett Horton) explains to the divorce court—after which Horton himself marries Blondell. At which point Blondell begins running roughshod over Horton’s life and dignity so that he unravels even more quickly than her first husband did.
When, in a backless and sideless black dress, Blondell taunts Horton that he is too much of a coward to hit her, he finally slaps her as her ex-husband did. She feigns indignation and runs back to her first husband. “What kind of divorce would you like?” she gleefully tells Horton. “Should I sue you for extreme cruelty, or would you like to sue me for infidelity?”
Her first husband (Warren William) has meanwhile had time to reflect on where he went wrong in their marriage. “Trouble was, I had the wrong technique,” William tells her. “I’ve been going to the movies quite a lot recently, and there the girls are quite different. They get kicked around and pushed in the face with grapefruit and they love it.” The reference is to what James Cagney does in The Public Enemy—a film Blondell was in, though it was actually Mae Clarke who got the grapefruit and she didn’t love it at all.
In any case, one eventually realizes that Smarty is not a Neanderthal statement about what women want. It’s about what one particular woman, Blondell, wants. She is a masochist, in the specifically sexual sense. She wants her husband to be rough with her; indeed, this is the only way she can experience the erotic gratification she desires. “If he really loved me,” she says after the bridge game blow-up, “he’d have hit me long ago.”
Smarty is therefore a kinkster variation on the divorce movie we’ve seen since DeMille’s 1919 Don’t Change Your Husband, in which divorce is a means to train a delinquent spouse in what is required to make the marriage successful, at which point the couple is reunited for the better. At the end of the movie, Blondell tests her first husband to see if he is ready for their reunion, brattily goading him until he rips her dress off, grabs her hair, and slaps her—at which point her eyes light up with complete, demented erotic joy. She has trained him. We hear her happily murmur the film’s last line: “Tony, dear, hit me again.”
(I’m no prude, but the Hays Code wasn’t the worst thing in the world.)
The Gay Divorcee (1934)
This was the second movie to pair Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, and the one that introduced Cole Porter’s “Night and Day.” Rogers is the divorcee—or wants to be, and therefore must be “caught” in the company of another man. Prior to no-fault divorce, the intentional staging of what would look like evidence of adultery, usually at a hotel with a hired companion who would be seen by the staff in a bathrobe in the same room and (falsely) testify in court if needed, was common. Rogers’s lawyer—Edward Everett Horton, who seems to be in every movie during this period—hires an experienced professional: Erik Rhodes as an adorable Italian.
However, Astaire has fallen hard for Rogers and, when he bumps into her at the resort where she is meant to be “compromised,” she mistakes Astaire for her hired professional. Disgusted, she interrogates Astaire about his sordid profession and he tries to answer her questions as best he can—except that he, increasingly baffled, thinks that they are talking about his dancing. When the confusion is cleared up, they have to sneak past Rhodes (who takes his assignment very seriously) so they can go down to the hotel ballroom and do what they do best.
Merry Wives of Reno (1934)
Another Reno divorce film in which none of the couples who go to the “Biggest Little City” actually get divorced. Indeed, the trope of the journey to a divorce mill is a helpful one to a movie as it offers a narrative of initial marital rupture, the departure of (usually) one spouse and the pursuit of the other, the complications of the journey and/or the divorce mill, and the resolution in which a reconstituted normalcy looks particularly welcoming after the (nevertheless invigorating) chaos of Reno or whatever other location constitutes the alternative anti-marital landscape. The great mythic elaboration of this hero’s and heroine’s journey is Sturges’s The Palm Beach Story.
Merry Wives of Reno is no Palm Beach Story. It strains to keep our attention, with a few sparkles amid the labored joking. It gives us two different wives who go to Reno to divorce their husbands, playing off the juxtaposition between the young, loving couple for whom divorce is tragedy, and the older, bickering one for whom divorce looks like deliverance.
In the opening scene the younger couple (the wife is Margaret Lindsay in a solid turn) wakes up on their first wedding anniversary, sharing a bed and quite passionately in love and happy. “Married life can really be sort of marvelous,” the husband muses. Then we hear a crash from the next-door apartment, as the middle-aged wife there is throwing objects at her husband. In the case of the first couple, the husband’s infidelity is a misperception and never happened; in the second (involving the same “other woman”) it is a years’-long habit. Another trope: gossip heard by the wife in the beauty parlor implicating the husband, sometimes accurately, sometimes not.
Reno here is a would-be forest of Arden, and its fairy denizens can reunite you with your spouse or find you a temporary new one, as you like, and always for a price. Frank McHugh (also in Smarty) is the Robin Goodfellow of the hotel, a concierge arranging chastisements for husbands or wives, depending on who greases his palm. Both couples stay married at the end, one out of love and truth, the other out of familiarity and acceptance. You admire what the movie is trying to do, but it never achieves the ebullience it seeks, and it serves best as an object lesson in failed screwball.