Blondell plays one of the most annoying and difficult to like women I have ever seen-capricious, selfish and manipulative. What will happen next in this dreadful film?! While the actors all give their best in this film, the writing was just awful-and a bit disturbing. Not too surprisingly, the new hubby is NOT amused by all this and eventually hauls off and hits Joan as well. Oddly, after they are no longer married, Joan deliberately throws herself at him-wearing revealing clothes and inviting him to come to dinner at her new home with her new husband (Edward Everett Horton). Joan deliberately goads Warren until he smacks her-and she sues for divorce. ".a sock in the eye is what every woman needs." Although Joan Blondell and Warren William play a couple who seem to be very in love, when they go to a dinner party, problems erupt.
At the end of the road is division of hearts, often a divorce court.' Blondell & Company should have paid heed.
Perhaps it would be well to quote a single paragraph from celebrated journalist Harriet Hubbard Ayer's essay `What Not To Do,' published in CORRECT SOCIAL USAGE (The New York Society Of Self-Culture, 1903) `Don't nag there's nothing in it but hateful thoughts for all concerned, and such thoughts are germs that breed deceit on one side and ungovernable temper on the other. Neither exemplify the sort of friend one would want to have during a time of domestic crisis. Rounding out the cast as two friends seemingly without meaningful lives of their own, viewers will probably find Frank McHugh to be distressingly simpleminded and pretty Claire Dodd vindictive & catty. Here, as the two men caught in Blondell's web, although they make valiant efforts, they seem out of place in the rather sordid storyline. Patrician Warren William & nervous Edward Everett Horton supplied wonderful moments in dozens of Golden Age films. Here, Blondell starts with everything and seems determined to claw her way to the bottom again. In most of her other roles of the period she played a smart & sassy gal who has to fight her way to happiness by final fadeout. Endlessly nagging, the script gives her one shrill note to play, which she does with unnerving tenacity. Joan Blondell, as blonde & curvaceous as ever, is portrayed as an intensely annoying young virago with all the charm of an acid bath. This distressful assertion is promoted by skillful players and smug dialogue, but to no avail. This very bizarre little comedy from Warner Bros., which sneaked in under the wire before the imposition of the Production Code, actually espouses physical abuse as the secret ingredient needed in keeping the romantic spark alive in marriage. This is not a great film by any measure, but viewed in an unusual context can be great fun.Ī bored & beautiful SMARTY enjoys goading both of her husbands into fits of jealous rage. In many ways, this is a deeply cynical film (witness the running commentary from the two constant house guests) about public and private lives, the last gasp of pre-code comedy before the censors came down hard on creative expression of and shuttered them into the kitchen with their aprons for the next thirty years or so, when Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton exposed a more modern version of the S/M games that can develop when love is stunted by circumstance.
But there is no indication that wife-beating is really the focus of this film, but instead the games people play when they discover relationship kinks that are not mainstream. Yes, there are slaps in the film, but Blondell's character seems intent on getting them- which to modern eyes seems bizarre indeed, and offensive in too many ways. Perhaps too many folks are getting their things in an uproar about this zippy, fast-paced little comedy about the battle of the sexes.
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