The Ex-Mrs. Bradford (1936)
RKO Pictures tried for a William Powell-Myrna Loy, Thin Man-style success by pairing Powell with Jean Arthur in The Ex-Mrs. Bradford. Instead of a married couple, though, the Bradfords are divorced. Powell’s character is a surgeon who likes some quiet in his life, while Arthur’s is a murder mystery novelist and magnet for trouble. She shows up at Powell’s apartment seeking either alimony or adventure, preferably the latter.
The suspicious death of a jockey is the occasion for her to get involved another murder mystery, and to reunite with her husband. Powell helps solve the crime, and is accidentally brained several times by his ex-wife along the way.
Arthur is daffy and fun, and the movie sold tickets, but this is no rival to The Thin Man or the Powell-Loy pairing, and the movie seems to know it. When the doctor (heavily bandaged and recovering from a gunshot wound) and his ex-wife are remarried at the end of the film, the officiating clergyman appears on a screen in their living room via pre-recorded movie. It is as if The Ex-Mrs. Bradford is making fun of its own hope to contrive bankable husband-and-wife characters.
Theodora Goes Wild (1936)
Theodora (Irene Dunne) lives in a bluestocking Connecticut town, adhering to the airless moral code of her old maid aunts, playing organ at church on Sundays—and writing steamy romance novels (e.g., The Sinner) under a pseudonym. The hypocrites who run the town are delighted to mount censorship campaigns against these novels because, in doing so, they get to read the dirty parts, their outraged clucking not always distinguishable from the sounds of arousal.
The novels’ cover illustrator (Melvyn Douglas) is intrigued to learn that the author is a woman so repressed and timid in real life. He shows up in Theodora’s home town to put pressure on her double existence and false propriety, get her to live authentically with no regard for the squares.
He is surprised, however, when Dunne takes his criticisms to heart. She shows up at his apartment in New York City—and discovers that he is living his own hypocritical double life. He maintains a sham marriage on the orders of his father who is running for governor and does not want the bad press of a divorce in the family.
And so, in part two, Dunne goes wild. She acts like the author of the salacious best-sellers, not the small town church organist. Her hijinx cause one divorce—her New York publisher and his sophisticated wife turn out not to be as broad-minded as they thought themselves—and then triggers the artist’s divorce too.
The second half of the movie comes to life with its star. Dunne is a genie out of the bottle—taking nothing seriously except her own delight, and infecting us with her mirth. “Dunne takes us inside her own amusement,” writes James Harvey, “rich, energizing, seemingly inexhaustible.” Her laugh is a combination of naughty vocal fry and something almost delphic.
The Hayes Code censors had a lot of trouble with this movie—its denigration of traditional decency, its celebration of carefree desire. And they were right. It is a wicked film.
Girl Loves Boy (1937)
A sentimental clunker set in “New England, 1907.” It depicts a class-crossed romance between Robert, a wealthy young wastrel, determined to prove his work ethic and recover his honor, and Dorothy, the daughter of a poor but upright family, who is a gifted singer yet determined never to accept charity. Robert was previously, and foolishly, married to a gold-digging floozy, but his father pays for her to go away and get an annulment. She never gets the annulment and shows up later with her lawyer to threaten Robert with divorce court in order to squeeze more money out of him. In the end, it is revealed that she and the “lawyer” are married; they are shakedown artists, and so Robert was never legally married to her in the first place. Cecilia Parker is just fine in the role of Dorothy, but the movie holds one’s interest about as long as a View Master.
The Divorce of Lady X (1938)
This delicious romantic comedy is a British production, though the director is the American Tim Whelan, and a remake of a lost earlier film from 1933. But even with a young Laurence Olivier as the male romantic lead, this movie is all about the bewitching presence (and diction) of Merle Oberon. I suppose she must share credit with the gelato hues of Technicolor, the costume designs of Rene Hubert, and, given her faerie beauty, the hand of God.
Some glimpses:
Olivier plays a divorce lawyer who falls hard for Oberon, but mistakenly believes that she is the wanton Lady Mere, married to his client Lord Mere. Lord Mere is played by Ralph Richardson and his Lady by Binnie Barnes, who had the lead in the lost 1933 film and whom we saw as the gold-digger in Three Smart Girls.
All the while that Olivier thinks that he has fallen for a loose woman, he becomes a misogynistic scourge in the courtroom, destroying the unfortunate women on the stand in their divorce cases. “Modern woman has disowned womanhood but refuses man’s obligations!” he cries, putting all of womankind on trial. “She demands freedom but won’t accept responsibility! She insists upon time to develop her personality, and she spends it in cogitating on which part of her body to paint next!” With parodic echoes of the 1934 film One More River, he judges that “the sooner man takes out his whip again, the better for sanity and progress.”
When he is enlightened as to his error, he becomes the champion of women in the courtroom, defending an accused client while Oberon looks on from the gallery, pleased as a presiding goddess. “M’lud,” Olivier addresses the judge, regarding a client, “I admit that the allegation that she was found locked in the bathroom with two of the co-respondents points to a certain lack of discretion on her part.” Nevertheless, she is “a woman. That unique and perfect achievement of the human species, especially evolved for the comfort and solace of man. A tender and delicate organism put into this world to make life a little brighter.” And to decide against her, says Olivier, would be to undermine the sacred institution of marriage itself.
Pushed further and the film could be screwball comedy of the Sturges sort. The Divorce of Lady X is never so wild, but the potential is there.
According to the notes at the American Film Institute catalog, the film was set to go into production in 1936 and “the reason for the year-long delay in production has not been determined.”
I can take a guess. In 1936, England was torn apart by the abdication crisis of Edward VIII, who sought to marry the American socialite Wallis Simpson. Simpson was divorced once and sought a second divorce (under suspicious legal circumstances) from her current husband in the fall of that year so that she and Edward would be able to marry. They did so, the king abdicating throne and duty. A farce about divorce would have taken on much heavier overtones had it been released in the immediate wake of that traumatic episode in British history.