If this was a worse picture, it would have been more pleasant to watch. That is, we watched this definitely (you can tell from the title alone) Pre-Code picture (part of a selection of Paramount Pre-Code films that arrived on the Criterion Channel this month) under the understanding that it would be a light-and-frothy, early screwball type film, as advertised. But nooooo, it's a wrenching tale of a woman (Syliva Sidney) falling in love with a drunken newspaperman (Fredric March - is there any other kind?),
helping him reform long enough to write a hit play, only to watch him go back to the bottle and his former lover when she is cast as the lead in said play. Then she decides that instead of leaving him and going back to her (super-rich, Canning magnate) father (as the controlling father insists), she is going to match him at his own game. So she takes to the bottle and the high life and starts going out with... a young Cary Grant!
We see them arrive at a restaurant where hubby and the actress are already dining, and she and her date toast to the "holy state of matrimony–single lives, twin beds and triple bromides in the morning" (definitely Pre-Code). But sadly (and unexpectedly, given the filmic conventions that have grown up since) her strategy doesn't succeed in winning back her husband, and she the lifestyle makes her weak and dizzy, and we see a doctor talking severely to her about "her condition". But then the husband comes back to their apartment with a ton of friends (including the Other Woman) and it's the last straw, and she finally walks out on him, after giving him a speech about how he never told her he loved her (he always just says "I think you're swell"). This, of course, makes him realize he really does love her, and that and the fact that there doesn't seem to be a sequel to the play coming to him any time soon (probably because he had to sober up to write the first one) drives him away from his actress girlfriend (an icy Adrianne Allen, who, while she doesn't hold a candle to the lovely Sylvia Sidney, can certainly drop acid bon mots with aplomb),
and New York, and back to the town everything started, Chicago, and his job at the paper back. He sobers up and keeps trying to contact his wife, but his calls are blocked and his letters sent back unopened. Then, one day, the gossip columnist whom he loathes (he knocked him down earlier in the film when he implied that he was marrying Sylvia Sidney for her money) shows him his latest column that reports that his wife has just checked into the maternity hospital. Delighted, he dashes down there, only to find that she's lost the baby. The father tries to stop him seeing her, lying that she refuses to see him, when in fact she's calling feverishly for him (strongly implying it was the father ensuring she never got the letters rather than her refusing to read them) and finally he gets to tell her he loves her. Will she survive? We don't discover, because the film ends there!
As you can see, something of a downer. If it was poorly made one might snicker at the melodrama, but both Sidney and March are very good and it's all-too-realistic. Personally I don't see what she saw in him at the start, as he's obviously a lush when she meets him at a party, and the omens are all bad (such as when he passes out drunk before he can get to their engagement party, or when he loses the ring at their wedding and has to substitute a bottle-opener),
but I guess he eventually rewards her faith in him... too late. And I certainly got engrossed in it, and wanted to see how things turned out, which means that it's a good film - just not the one we wanted! (Grant's role is very small, and I think he's also an actor in the play whose face you never see, because that definitely sounded like him. But you can't miss those looks (and March is no slouch in that department, either).) Oh, and the title comes from the main character's favorite toast.
And also scandalized enough people to make it hard to advertise at the time, apparently. Oh, and one more nugget: it was directed by Dorothy Arzner, who was, at the time, the only female director working in Hollywood.
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