“The law makes us a bunch of puppets on strings, like Punch and Judy,” says Ruth (Mae Clarke again) in James Whale’s 1932 “The Impatient Maiden.” Ruth is an assistant to a divorce lawyer who regularly witnesses marriages fraught with abuse, abandonment and betrayal. (This is in no small part because of the country’s economic precarity, a reality that factors into a number of films in this series.)
A practical gal nevertheless filled with quiet yearning, Ruth suggests a reasonable course of action when she falls for Lew Ayres’s Dr. Brown: wait to tie the knot until his medical practice takes off. Scandal and hardship ensue when Dr. Brown rejects Ruth’s proposition, yet we sense that the root of the lovers’ problems lies not in a woman’s apprehension about marriage, but in the inert ideals that cloud the minds of men.
Other films in the series take marriage lightly, to self-affirming and playfully joyous effect.
In “One Hour With You” (1932), a musical comedy directed by Ernst Lubitsch with the assistance of George Cukor, the stars Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald play a married couple, Andre and Colette, who are first seen canoodling in a park — a place regularly reserved for illicit lovers. Colette’s bestie, a bona fide homewrecker named Mitzi (a delightfully lusty Genevieve Tobin), takes a liking to Andre, prompting a night of infidelity from both sides that is conclusively brushed under the rug when the couple decide they love each other too much to let such trivial pursuits ruin them. As for Mitzi, she responds to her own husband’s divorce request with suave nonchalance, driving off with a risqué self-portrait in tow.
Particularly touching are the moments in these films when women stand up for each other in the face of gendered moralizing.
Five Movies to Watch This Winter
In “Bad Girl,” when Dorothy meets her future husband and stays at his place until 4 a.m., she’s kicked out of the apartment she shares with her brother, Floyd. But she never actually suffers for her indiscretions: Floyd’s headstrong girlfriend, Edna (Minna Gombell), a single mother struggling to balance work and child care, promptly dumps Floyd for his grossly patriarchal ideas and takes Dorothy under her wing.
Before the Code stamped down on portrayals of interracial couples and the kinds of roles available to the (very few) actors of color employed by Hollywood, films like “The Bitter Tea of General Yen” (1933) could be made. For audiences at the time, the interracial romance between Barbara Stanwyck’s missionary character and a Chinese warlord contained shocking levels of intimacy — no matter that Nils Asther, a Swedish actor, played General Yen. That said, the more remarkable aspect of this undeniably prejudiced film is the casting of the Japanese actress Toshia Mori in her biggest and most dynamic role during her brief stint in the United States.
