The demise of FilmStruck made the national news this morning. My mother heard it discussed on the radio; she texted to let me know about the "praise and regret." I am experiencing whatever you call grief when it's more than half grievance, because there was no good reason to shut the service down. I've signed up for the Criterion Channel, of course, but I would have preferred WarnerMedia to get its head out of its portfolio and keep its original, niche, incalculable service alive. In any case, tonight when I looked at the TCM buffer for the first time all week, I saw one film which had been on my watchlist at FilmStruck and which I had never gotten around to, being distracted by early Ernst Lubitsch and wartime Ealing and a whole lot of film noir I never reviewed. I watched it, obviously. I know a sendoff when I see one.
Tim Whelan's The Divorce of Lady X (1938) is a British screwball comedy filmed in Technicolor and starring Merle Oberon and Laurence Olivier. Any of these factors would make it weird enough to be worthy of note; it's like lagniappe that it's actually good. London's the setting, on a night so acridly fog-bound that a traveler returning from abroad is forced to ditch his cab and check into the nearest hotel where the attendees of a fancy dress ball for charity are just receiving the same bad news about their travel plans. Not that you could convince Olivier's Logan that it's any of his concern. A brisk and glossy young barrister, he's as beautiful as a blackbird and much more insufferable, refusing the hotel manager's request to open the outer room of his newly nabbed suite to his stranded fellow guests with eloquent relish: "I've been traveling for two days, I've had an extremely filthy crossing, my train was two hours late at Victoria Station . . . What I need really very badly is a good night's sleep, and I shall have that though every lady in London thinks me a cad, a brute, and a beast. Good night!" His specialty in court is divorces, but that's really no excuse for his reaction to the gate-crashing of Oberon's Leslie, as he deduces with the patronizing assurance of those whom the comedy gods are about to destroy that his unwelcome visitor must be an unfaithful wife caught out on an adventure, così fan tutte. "I've met too many women like you before—conceited, sure of yourself, and sure of your power over men!" Of course he's attracted to her, dark-haired, petite, and cheerfully take-charge in the blue-and-white crinoline of the Second Empire; of course it just makes him more judgmental and it's worse the next morning when the particulars of his latest client's petition—tallying so neatly with his topsy-turvy night at the Royal Parks Hotel—convince him that he's just become the co-respondent in his next case. Eager to disclaim male culpability, he delivers himself of a courtroom denunciation of the frailties of woman that would well become an MRA ("Modern woman has disowned womanhood, but refuses man's obligations. She demands freedom, but won't accept responsibility. She insists upon time to develop her personality and she spends it in cogitating on which part of her body to paint next. By independence, she means idleness. By equality, she means carrying on like Catherine the Great!") and it is just his luck that his audience includes the very single, very incensed Leslie. Last night she listened to his blithering chauvinism with a grave, wide-eyed sincerity before conning him out of first his pajamas and then his bed; now she sets her sights on his heart. He hasn't got a chance. She's a screwball heroine. She's nobody's fool, and the world is hers.
I don't know why Olivier didn't do more comedy. Removed from a leading man's protected status of serious business, his improbable good looks are revealed as an invitation to all the subversion the screenwriters can throw his way—anything that flawless is asking to get messed up. His Shakespearean voice flies up half an octave, cracks in helpless temper or despairing adoration; he loses fights with his own assumptions and inanimate objects; he tries to pretend he isn't doing nervous things with his hands. He's enough of a flustered romantic under his slim stuffed shirt that we understand what Leslie might see in him beyond the satisfaction of the game, but we won't be sorry to see him taken down a few pegs, or even a few more after that. For her part, Oberon is perfectly in key with the sexiness and the recklessness of her genre. Her Leslie is a delicate trickster with no time for disapproval: when Logan shakes a reproving finger at her, she catches it. "You do like talking about yourself, don't you?" She understands there are risks to playing with affections, especially when some of them are her own. But he's so crashingly confident, how can she resist playing up to his smitten anxieties about the oft-married and equally oft-divorced Lady Mere, flaunting her supposedly scandalous reputation while he ties himself in knots about his own—nobody but nobody is ever going to believe that they passed a night as innocent as any alibi he's ever demolished in court. "Four marriages in five years and two—episodes," he groans. "You don't seem to appreciate my frankness," she sighs. I note that she's a Leslie before it was a popular female name; his first name is the embarrassing Everard, which she makes a point of signing across his mirror in rose-pink lipstick before she leaves. More than once, the camera catches him holding her discarded fancy dress against himself as if trying to slip inside the truth of "Lady X," the serial gold digger all his professional evidence adds up to or the sweetly confounding stranger of the Royal Parks Hotel. It's not all parody, even when the screenplay by Lajos Biró, Ian Dalrymple, and Arthur Wimperis sets its most romantically melodramatic conversation to the overheated zither of a Russian nightclub. Screwball stands or falls by fast talk and chemistry and The Divorce of Lady X has both:
"But then I didn't like you in your office. I much preferred you in your bedroom."
"Our bedroom."
"My bedroom."
"Surely that's the proper place to judge your future husband?"
It has a well-assembled supporting cast, too, most notably Morton Selten as Leslie's cynical but kindly grandfather, J.H. Roberts as Logan's just plain cynical colleague, and above all Ralph Richardson as the marriage-worried Lord Mere, who drifts around with an umbrella looking vaguely bemused by everything until he gets suspicious enough to go on a vaguely bemused drunk. And the Technicolor photography by Harry Stradling is in fact luscious: the opening credits scroll like the neon signs of Piccadilly Circus. The sets and the costumes have a confectionary sweetness, all mint-cream and lavender and ribbon-blue and gold. The relevant pajamas are a heinously cherry-ish candy-stripe; they make Oberon look like a boiled sweet and their effect on Olivier can only be anticipated. (It's bad.) Even a borrowed pair of horn-rims pops red as licorice. Occasionally I feel Oberon has been too palely made up, but I suspect there's something about race at work there. Miklós Rósza is responsible for the score including the overheated zither and I approve. If it's not as madcap as Bringing Up Baby (1938) or as close to the bone as The Lady Eve (1941), both of which feel like the movie's closest relatives in terms of subject-object reversals and garden paths, Alexander Korda can still be proud of his decision to produce it in the wake of the unfinished 1937 I, Claudius. I'd love to be able to compare it with its quota quickie original Counsel's Opinion (1933), but since all that seems to survive of the older film is its entry in the BFI 75 Most Wanted, I'll just have to cross fingers for broom closets in Argentina.
I still understand why I've never seen it listed among the great screwball comedies. The leads never lose their chemistry, but the last third of the film feels increasingly diffuse and overstuffed, as though the screenwriters have mistaken the piling-on of plot twists for the fun of letting them play out. I am generally in favor of solidarity between female characters, but the much-discussed Lady Mere (Binnie Barnes) works infinitely better as a Maguffin than she does as a person onscreen; the action feels sidetracked every time it dives out of the points of view of its protagonists and I really don't know the purpose of the third-act fox chase unless someone thought it would show up nicely in color. The picture slows itself down just as it should be winding up for a sparkling whiplash and it's not fatal, but it does the story no favors in a genre so dependent on precision timing and unimpeachable absurdity. It pulls itself together in time for the ending, however, which would be only a comeuppance if not for the telltale shy flicker of happiness across Logan's face as Leslie demurely does his proposing for him—he may be seasick, professionally shaky, and feel at the moment like an absolute fool, but he's loved by a woman who turned him upside down and shook him like a dicebox and in the screwball universe there's no greater proof of devotion. Now I'm sorry they were never paired with a better script that wasn't Wuthering Heights (1939). This action brought to you by my proper backers at Patreon.
Tim Whelan's The Divorce of Lady X (1938) is a British screwball comedy filmed in Technicolor and starring Merle Oberon and Laurence Olivier. Any of these factors would make it weird enough to be worthy of note; it's like lagniappe that it's actually good. London's the setting, on a night so acridly fog-bound that a traveler returning from abroad is forced to ditch his cab and check into the nearest hotel where the attendees of a fancy dress ball for charity are just receiving the same bad news about their travel plans. Not that you could convince Olivier's Logan that it's any of his concern. A brisk and glossy young barrister, he's as beautiful as a blackbird and much more insufferable, refusing the hotel manager's request to open the outer room of his newly nabbed suite to his stranded fellow guests with eloquent relish: "I've been traveling for two days, I've had an extremely filthy crossing, my train was two hours late at Victoria Station . . . What I need really very badly is a good night's sleep, and I shall have that though every lady in London thinks me a cad, a brute, and a beast. Good night!" His specialty in court is divorces, but that's really no excuse for his reaction to the gate-crashing of Oberon's Leslie, as he deduces with the patronizing assurance of those whom the comedy gods are about to destroy that his unwelcome visitor must be an unfaithful wife caught out on an adventure, così fan tutte. "I've met too many women like you before—conceited, sure of yourself, and sure of your power over men!" Of course he's attracted to her, dark-haired, petite, and cheerfully take-charge in the blue-and-white crinoline of the Second Empire; of course it just makes him more judgmental and it's worse the next morning when the particulars of his latest client's petition—tallying so neatly with his topsy-turvy night at the Royal Parks Hotel—convince him that he's just become the co-respondent in his next case. Eager to disclaim male culpability, he delivers himself of a courtroom denunciation of the frailties of woman that would well become an MRA ("Modern woman has disowned womanhood, but refuses man's obligations. She demands freedom, but won't accept responsibility. She insists upon time to develop her personality and she spends it in cogitating on which part of her body to paint next. By independence, she means idleness. By equality, she means carrying on like Catherine the Great!") and it is just his luck that his audience includes the very single, very incensed Leslie. Last night she listened to his blithering chauvinism with a grave, wide-eyed sincerity before conning him out of first his pajamas and then his bed; now she sets her sights on his heart. He hasn't got a chance. She's a screwball heroine. She's nobody's fool, and the world is hers.
I don't know why Olivier didn't do more comedy. Removed from a leading man's protected status of serious business, his improbable good looks are revealed as an invitation to all the subversion the screenwriters can throw his way—anything that flawless is asking to get messed up. His Shakespearean voice flies up half an octave, cracks in helpless temper or despairing adoration; he loses fights with his own assumptions and inanimate objects; he tries to pretend he isn't doing nervous things with his hands. He's enough of a flustered romantic under his slim stuffed shirt that we understand what Leslie might see in him beyond the satisfaction of the game, but we won't be sorry to see him taken down a few pegs, or even a few more after that. For her part, Oberon is perfectly in key with the sexiness and the recklessness of her genre. Her Leslie is a delicate trickster with no time for disapproval: when Logan shakes a reproving finger at her, she catches it. "You do like talking about yourself, don't you?" She understands there are risks to playing with affections, especially when some of them are her own. But he's so crashingly confident, how can she resist playing up to his smitten anxieties about the oft-married and equally oft-divorced Lady Mere, flaunting her supposedly scandalous reputation while he ties himself in knots about his own—nobody but nobody is ever going to believe that they passed a night as innocent as any alibi he's ever demolished in court. "Four marriages in five years and two—episodes," he groans. "You don't seem to appreciate my frankness," she sighs. I note that she's a Leslie before it was a popular female name; his first name is the embarrassing Everard, which she makes a point of signing across his mirror in rose-pink lipstick before she leaves. More than once, the camera catches him holding her discarded fancy dress against himself as if trying to slip inside the truth of "Lady X," the serial gold digger all his professional evidence adds up to or the sweetly confounding stranger of the Royal Parks Hotel. It's not all parody, even when the screenplay by Lajos Biró, Ian Dalrymple, and Arthur Wimperis sets its most romantically melodramatic conversation to the overheated zither of a Russian nightclub. Screwball stands or falls by fast talk and chemistry and The Divorce of Lady X has both:
"But then I didn't like you in your office. I much preferred you in your bedroom."
"Our bedroom."
"My bedroom."
"Surely that's the proper place to judge your future husband?"
It has a well-assembled supporting cast, too, most notably Morton Selten as Leslie's cynical but kindly grandfather, J.H. Roberts as Logan's just plain cynical colleague, and above all Ralph Richardson as the marriage-worried Lord Mere, who drifts around with an umbrella looking vaguely bemused by everything until he gets suspicious enough to go on a vaguely bemused drunk. And the Technicolor photography by Harry Stradling is in fact luscious: the opening credits scroll like the neon signs of Piccadilly Circus. The sets and the costumes have a confectionary sweetness, all mint-cream and lavender and ribbon-blue and gold. The relevant pajamas are a heinously cherry-ish candy-stripe; they make Oberon look like a boiled sweet and their effect on Olivier can only be anticipated. (It's bad.) Even a borrowed pair of horn-rims pops red as licorice. Occasionally I feel Oberon has been too palely made up, but I suspect there's something about race at work there. Miklós Rósza is responsible for the score including the overheated zither and I approve. If it's not as madcap as Bringing Up Baby (1938) or as close to the bone as The Lady Eve (1941), both of which feel like the movie's closest relatives in terms of subject-object reversals and garden paths, Alexander Korda can still be proud of his decision to produce it in the wake of the unfinished 1937 I, Claudius. I'd love to be able to compare it with its quota quickie original Counsel's Opinion (1933), but since all that seems to survive of the older film is its entry in the BFI 75 Most Wanted, I'll just have to cross fingers for broom closets in Argentina.
I still understand why I've never seen it listed among the great screwball comedies. The leads never lose their chemistry, but the last third of the film feels increasingly diffuse and overstuffed, as though the screenwriters have mistaken the piling-on of plot twists for the fun of letting them play out. I am generally in favor of solidarity between female characters, but the much-discussed Lady Mere (Binnie Barnes) works infinitely better as a Maguffin than she does as a person onscreen; the action feels sidetracked every time it dives out of the points of view of its protagonists and I really don't know the purpose of the third-act fox chase unless someone thought it would show up nicely in color. The picture slows itself down just as it should be winding up for a sparkling whiplash and it's not fatal, but it does the story no favors in a genre so dependent on precision timing and unimpeachable absurdity. It pulls itself together in time for the ending, however, which would be only a comeuppance if not for the telltale shy flicker of happiness across Logan's face as Leslie demurely does his proposing for him—he may be seasick, professionally shaky, and feel at the moment like an absolute fool, but he's loved by a woman who turned him upside down and shook him like a dicebox and in the screwball universe there's no greater proof of devotion. Now I'm sorry they were never paired with a better script that wasn't Wuthering Heights (1939). This action brought to you by my proper backers at Patreon.
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