The Road to Reno (1931)
Reno, Nevada was linked with divorce since the beginning of popular American cinema, just as it was in the American mind. The American Film Institute database cites two feature length films dealing with divorce and Reno released in 1910: A Reno Romance, a comedy, and Settled Out of Court, a melodrama. (Both involve couples who go to Reno to divorce but end up staying married.)
During the next two decades, over a dozen other Reno divorce movies were made. This number does not include the many films of the 1910s and 1920s that mention Reno or Nevada as a shorthand for divorce, as in Don’t Change Your Husband (1919) which ends with the triumphant “I’m going to wire for your same old suite—at Reno!” and The Primitive Lover (1922) in which the divorce is said to take place in Nevada.
Cornelius Vanderbilt IV, cut off by his famously wealthy family because he chose the (to them unforgivably disreputable) newspaper business as his profession, published the novel Reno in 1929. The melodramatic plot centers on divorcees, yet the author also tries to emphasize that the city has a great deal to offer apart from its divorce industry, and takes pains throughout to promote the charms of Reno and the wholesomeness of its citizens. Vanderbilt was very fond of the city and made it his home until his death in 1974. Yet he moved to Reno in 1927, not for the scenery but rather to obtain the first of his six divorces.
The divorce judge in Vanderbilt’s novel claims that the Reno divorce industry was almost entirely a result of the world war, “responsible for the greatest spiritual upheaval the world has ever seen,” and also European libertinism. The young men who went off to war “had one and all broken away from their old moorings, and having tasted freedom and license, they returned and entered marriage with the standards of the spiritually-wrecked and defiant continent.”
I have not yet been able to obtain a copy of the 1930 film adaptation of Vanderbilt’s novel, but it precedes a trio of pre-Code Reno divorce movies all released in 1931 and each very different in terms of its attitude toward “the biggest little city in the world.”
The first, The Road to Reno (screenplay by Josephine Lovett, not to be confused with the 1938 film with that title) is a melodrama with some bite. It offers a grim, even brutal look at Reno divorce culture. The legal system is a kind of factory. We see the tired judge hearing a divorce case. “How many more?” he asks the clerk, “Twelve,” she replies. Newly liberated divorcees emerge giddily from the courthouse. One removes her wedding ring and tosses it into the Truckee River, where it startles a fish.
But the real experiences of Reno divorce are seen, not in the courthouse, but in the casinos, nightclubs, resort hotels, and entertainments that house and distract the shattered souls on pilgrimage there. A man and woman are gambling; a second woman reaches between them to take some of his winnings. “This is still my husband,” she says, but is stared down by the first woman who objects: “This is still my money.” Less amusing is the drunk, lonely woman who robotically slurs to no one in particular: “I’m pretty I’m free I love it I adore it I’m free.”
And there is the despondent new recipient of a divorce decree (an uncredited Adrienne Ames, who would divorce three times) who returns to her hotel and, just offscreen, blows her brains out on the stairs. The hotel manager sighs at this inconsiderateness, but at least the suite is now free for Mrs. Jackie Millet, on her way to Reno from New York City to obtain her third divorce.
Jackie is played by Lilyan Tashman who, with Peggy Shannon who plays her daughter Lee, is an exception to the main cast’s otherwise wooden acting. Mother Jackie is a narcissitic libertine who likes being surrounded by men and cocktails. Daughter Lee tries to be cheerful and tolerant of her mother but she, and even moreso her disgusted and resentful brother Jeff, are loyal to their mother’s latest husband, a decent, older man who nevertheless agrees to testify falsely to “cruelty” against Jackie in order to facilitate her request for a divorce. Jeff has sadly channeled his anger at his mother into alcoholism, though he will eventually take more violent action.
Lee accompanies her mother to Reno, and on the train out to Nevada meets Tom, an earnest young mining engineer who is on his way to a new job in Burma via San Francisco, but makes a detour to Reno because he is smitten with Lee. In Reno, though, Lee gets caught up in the decadent life of her mother’s upscale divorce tourist ranch, with its horse riding, archery, massive swimming pool, constant drinks, and periodic visits from lawyers. And older men trying to make it with young Lee, including her mother’s new lover Ken, a scoundrel who at one point attempts to rape Lee.
Lee is too innocent to understand Ken’s designs at first, and then too embarrassed for her mother to tell her what Ken has been up to. Similarly, Tom early on saw Ken flitting easily from kissing the mother to making a pass at the daughter—and decked him, but was too much of a gentleman to explain why he did so to Lee, who angrily sends Tom away. When a reunited Tom and Lee tell Jackie that they want to get married, and learn that Jackie and Ken are getting married, Lee finally tells her mother the truth: “Ken’s been making love to both of us all along.” Jackie refuses to believe her. Now Lee refuses to marry Tom, in order to spare him from being involved with her dysfunctional, rotten family, with her near-rapist as new stepfather.
The movie is a Jazz Age next-morning hangover, in which the young generation must try to free itself from the dissolution of the older. (In this it is similar to the 1927 Children of Divorce.) The film ends at Jackie and Ken’s wedding. Lee’s brother Jeff shows up with a gun, kills Ken and then himself. Jackie, finally remorseful and rather belatedly concerned for her children’s happiness, convinces Lee to go with Tom to Burma. We see Jackie’s chastened face superimposed over the Reno courthouse, accompanied by the sound of the bailiffs announcing new divorce cases.
Coming up: two more 1931 Reno divorce movies, one a comedy in Marx Brothers style.