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The Thirties romantic comedy of dizzy heiresses and tipsy swells, strikingly curdled. The journalist-dramatist (Fredric March) first spots the young socialite (Sylvia Sidney) through a clutter of empty bottles, a half-screwball, half-harrowing stroll through "the state of holy matrimony, modern style" follows. A stinging emotional engineer, Dorothy Arzner dissolves from the distraught heroine fleeing the botched engagement party (she drives into the night while her fellow is passed-out drunk) to wedding bells, then caps the ceremony with a close-up of the groom's improvised ring, a bottle-opener placed on the bride's finger. "I see you believe in signs." The clattering typewriter and the cocktail shaker, the theatrical smash (When Women Say "No") introduces the former flame (Adrienne Allen) along with the idea of an open marriage. Sidney plays along (a brief panning shot gives her view of the perilous pit of a brittle soiree) but she only knows "the words, not the tune," even Dad (George Irving) can only call her a "doormat." "Oh sure. Never give a woman credit for keeping up a man's spirits." Arzner's sophisticates play like Lubitsch's stripped off their soigné armor, desperately wisecracking and tap-dancing and warbling boozy songs to keep from noticing the void at the center. (Heard between strained witticisms: "Let me be a little sad, will you?") When the wife unties her soused husband's necktie and hears another woman's name on his lips, the lingering hurt in her eyes looks back to Griffith's The Struggle; the hypersensitive lighting and resuscitative embrace at the hospital look ahead to Dreyer's Ordet. With Skeets Gallagher, Esther Howard, Cary Grant, Florence Britton, and Robert Greig. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |