Norma Shearer lights up the screen in her Oscar-winning starring role in this drama about a free-spirited couple who agree to marry on terms of full equality.
We first meet Shearer’s Jerry Bernard with Theodore ‘Ted’ Martin (Chester Morris), the newspaperman she loves, enjoying themselves apart from a group of their friends, affluent young New Yorkers, at her father’s country lodge outside of the city.
With Jerry in his arms, Ted tells her he likes it that she has ‘a man’s point of view,’ and she says:
‘That’s why we’re going to make a go of it. Everything equal.’
‘You bet!’ says Ted.
‘75-25,’ kids Jerry, but they embrace rather than shake on it.
They announce their decision and soon marry.
Celebrating their third anniversary, Jerry discovers that Ted has had sex with another woman. Ted tries every way he can to reassure an inconsolable Jerry that ‘it doesn’t mean a thing,’ ‘there’s nothing to it,’ and ‘it doesn’t make the slightest difference.’
However, when Ted returns home from a business trip a week later, Jerry tells him, ‘I’ve balanced our accounts.’ This time around, Ted flatly rejects his own reasoning ‘that being unfaithful doesn’t mean anything.’
Jerry and Ted divorce. Their lives continue apart within the context of their network of friends as they make careers and couple, uncouple, and recross paths in their mid-twenties in Manhattan. Their set seems a good deal more sophisticated, hip, and believeable—not to mention a lot more grown up—than the cuddly ‘friends’ of the latter day sit-com.
Jerry’s best friend Helen (Florence Eldridge), a divorcée, remarries Bill Baldwin (Robert Elliott). Ted’s best friend, the debonair and wealthy Don (Robert Montgomery), and Hank (Tyler Brooke), seem to be having too good a time to get married.
Paul (Conrad Nagel), who had hoped to marry Jerry, instead marries Dot (Helen Johnson/Judith Wood), a woman infatuated with him, whom he does not love but feels responsible for because she was disfigured by a car accident that his drunk driving caused. Dot’s sister Mary (Helene Millard) says she has no interest in marriage.
Jerry and Ted’s story has an ending that is romantic but not forever, and the movie the better for it.
This is a good studio production and the parts are well written and well played. Zelda Sears, the actress who appears as Jerry’s opinionated maid, Hannah, also was a screenwriter who, along with Nick Grindé, got credit for the film treatment.
Some may find it surprising to hear people from long ago do and say things that would not be out of place today on their thoughts and feelings about love, marriage and the opposite sex.
However, frank discussion of these matters all but disappeared from the silver screen when the Hayes Office started enforcing the industry’s self-imposed ‘Production Code’—censorship guidelines on sexual and moral content—in 1934, and continued to do so for nearly three decades.
The Divorcée is among one of several sets of so-called ‘pre-code’ films that Turner Classic Movies has collected and released on DVD, marketed as its ‘Forbidden Hollywood Collection’. Despite the luridly leggy cover art, the sexual, moral, social, and even in some instances political subject matter make for the raciest parts.
Other notable films in these sets include Jean Harlow in Red-Headed Woman (1932), Barbara Stanwyck in The Purchase Price (1932) and BabyFace (1933) and Lionel Barrymore as an alcoholic lawyer (when alcohol consumption was illegal) in A Free Soul (1931), costarring Norma Shearer, Leslie Howard, and Clark Gable.
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