Merrily We Go to Hell
Oct. 26th, 2019 07:31 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerIt was sovay, I think, who said something to the effect that Hollywood film lost a certain essential honesty when they implemented the Hays Code; I was put in mind of this comment while I was watching Dorothy Arzner’s Merrily We Go to Hell, a pre-Code movie about the marriage of an heiress and a charming, frequently drunk newspaper reporter.
There’s a bit of sentimentality in the way the story wraps up (they’re back together and he’s off the sauce for good), but most of the film is an almost startling contrast to the frothy unreality of screwball comedies. (I love a good screwball comedy, but you just have to accept that they take place in a glamorous alternate universe.)
When Joan first meets Jerry Corbett, they’re both at a party: he’s sitting on the balcony, already drunk, and she slips out to the balcony to escape the boorish attentions of another party guest. But Jerry, though drunk, is witty and charming, and wins her heart by singing her a little song: “First she gave me gingerbread and then she gave me cake; and then she gave me creme de menthe for meeting her at the gate.”
Joan is so enchanted that she immediately invites him to tea the next day, where she serves the aforementioned gingerbread, cake, and creme de menthe. But he doesn’t show up until all the guests are gone. And then, once they’re engaged, he shows up late to their engagement announcement party… and only because one of his friends brought him there passed out in the back of a cab.
Joan’s father, her best friend (named Charlcey, of all things), and presumably the entire audience by this point all unite in crying “Don’t marry him, Joan!” But of course she does. At first it’s all right - he cleans up for the honeymoon - but then he sells a play to Broadway, where the management casts as the lead actress…
Jerry’s former girlfriend Claire!!! Jerry promptly proceeds to fall right off the wagon, and after a couple of twists and turns, he spends the night with Claire. When he returns home the next morning, Joan greets him very collectedly. She’s unpacking her trunk. Her grandmother, she says, would certainly have left him for this behavior, but she realizes that they have a modern marriage. “I always said you were swell,” Jerry says, caught flat-footed by this turn of events.
Joan responds, “Perhaps you won’t think so much longer, because if being a modern husband gives you privileges, then being a modern wife gives me privileges.” Their friend Charlie Baxter (played by Cary Grant) has been asking her to go to lunch with him, and today she plans to accept; and on that note, she leaves a gobsmacked Jerry alone in the apartment.
And then both Jerry and Joan descend on parallel paths of debauchery. (It’s not, by the standards of 2019, at all graphic, but still, it’s hard to imagine a post-Code film portraying an open marriage, no matter how alcohol-sodden and unhappy.) Eventually Joan leaves him, and that’s when the Hollywood sentiment kicks in and herds them back together, but until then it’s a startling frank movie if you’re used to post-Code circumlocutions.
sovay, I think, who said something to the effect that Hollywood film lost a certain essential honesty when they implemented the Hays Code; I was put in mind of this comment while I was watching Dorothy Arzner’s Merrily We Go to Hell, a pre-Code movie about the marriage of an heiress and a charming, frequently drunk newspaper reporter. There’s a bit of sentimentality in the way the story wraps up (they’re back together and he’s off the sauce for good), but most of the film is an almost startling contrast to the frothy unreality of screwball comedies. (I love a good screwball comedy, but you just have to accept that they take place in a glamorous alternate universe.)
When Joan first meets Jerry Corbett, they’re both at a party: he’s sitting on the balcony, already drunk, and she slips out to the balcony to escape the boorish attentions of another party guest. But Jerry, though drunk, is witty and charming, and wins her heart by singing her a little song: “First she gave me gingerbread and then she gave me cake; and then she gave me creme de menthe for meeting her at the gate.”
Joan is so enchanted that she immediately invites him to tea the next day, where she serves the aforementioned gingerbread, cake, and creme de menthe. But he doesn’t show up until all the guests are gone. And then, once they’re engaged, he shows up late to their engagement announcement party… and only because one of his friends brought him there passed out in the back of a cab.
Joan’s father, her best friend (named Charlcey, of all things), and presumably the entire audience by this point all unite in crying “Don’t marry him, Joan!” But of course she does. At first it’s all right - he cleans up for the honeymoon - but then he sells a play to Broadway, where the management casts as the lead actress…
Jerry’s former girlfriend Claire!!! Jerry promptly proceeds to fall right off the wagon, and after a couple of twists and turns, he spends the night with Claire. When he returns home the next morning, Joan greets him very collectedly. She’s unpacking her trunk. Her grandmother, she says, would certainly have left him for this behavior, but she realizes that they have a modern marriage. “I always said you were swell,” Jerry says, caught flat-footed by this turn of events.
Joan responds, “Perhaps you won’t think so much longer, because if being a modern husband gives you privileges, then being a modern wife gives me privileges.” Their friend Charlie Baxter (played by Cary Grant) has been asking her to go to lunch with him, and today she plans to accept; and on that note, she leaves a gobsmacked Jerry alone in the apartment.
And then both Jerry and Joan descend on parallel paths of debauchery. (It’s not, by the standards of 2019, at all graphic, but still, it’s hard to imagine a post-Code film portraying an open marriage, no matter how alcohol-sodden and unhappy.) Eventually Joan leaves him, and that’s when the Hollywood sentiment kicks in and herds them back together, but until then it’s a startling frank movie if you’re used to post-Code circumlocutions.
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Date: 2019-10-26 05:47 pm (UTC)That is indeed something I have said about pre-Code movies and now I really feel I should see this one, because the idea of a screwball comedy where it matters if everyone actually drinks that much fascinates me. I had previously been aware of Merrily We Go to Hell but not pursued it because my experience of Arzner's films is about fifty percent soul-crushing. The cast is also of interest to me. Thank you for the heads-up!
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Date: 2019-10-27 01:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-10-27 11:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-10-27 11:56 pm (UTC)