THE GAY DIVORCEE (Mark Sandrich, 1934)

A very funny and charming entertainment, The Gay Divorcée is also, like the best of the other Astaire-Rogers films, an authentic film whose story, imagery and musical aspects develop a serious idea. (See my pieces, which you will find elsewhere on this site, about Roberta (William A. Seiter, 1935), Follow the Fleet (Mark Sandrich, 1936) and Swing Time (George Stevens, 1936).) By “idea” I do not mean message—some fatuous position impressing the material with the makers’ heartless, empty-headed self-importance. What results from “message musicals” is such trash as West Side Story (Jerome Robbins, Robert Wise, 1961), whose only purpose is to connive money out of a gullible public. By contrast, The Gay Divorcée is about something.

The film, directed by Mark Sandrich, opens in Paris, where Guy Holden (Fred Astaire), an American dancer, is introduced dining with his friend Egbert Fitzgerald (Edward Everett Horton), a solicitor. The scene switches to a London customs station, where Holden falls instantly in love with Mimi Glossop (Ginger Rogers)—and why not?—after accidentally ripping her dress and covering the damage with his raincoat. (No Justin Timberlake, he.) Mimi, who is also American, is accompanied by Aunt Hortense (Alice Brady, in one of the funniest performances I’ve seen—this, from the splendid dramatic actress who would play the mother of the boys charged with homicide in John Ford’s 1939 Young Mr. Lincoln.) Hortense also is American. Mimi proves elusive to Guy, who searches all over London for her after singing and dancing to “(It’s Just Like) Looking for a Needle in a Haystack.” When he finds her finally, she gives him the needle by turning down his marriage proposal, although she does tell him her first name. “Mimi,” he sighs. What Guy doesn’t know is that Mimi is married and is in England to get a divorce; guess who is representing her. The scene switches to a Brighton resort hotel, where Egbert is busily arranging for a paid correspondent to surprise Mimi’s spouse with a show of adultery in order to get him to divorce her. Guy has accompanied his friend there, and when he spots his beloved Mimi he pours out his romantic heart in song, leading her in dance: Cole Porter’s erotic masterpiece, “Night and Day.” She, though, mistakes him for the correspondent, and, once he ostentatiously arrives singing opera, the real correspondent (Erik Rhodes) confines the couple to her hotel suite; but Guy and Mimi slip out at night to dance the Continental (“You kiss while you’re dancing . . .”—although Astaire and Rogers, as is their wont, never do kiss). Unfortunately, the next morning, neither Guy’s presence nor that of the correspondent convinces Mimi’s husband to give her a divorce. He forgives her instead. Fortunately, though, a waiter (Eric Blore) recognizes him as someone maritally attached to someone other than Mimi. The bigamy exposed, back in Guy’s London hotel room and about to go home together, Guy and Mimi dance a dance of freedom, lightly stepping upon and over the furniture in the room, including a dinette set, in a tour-de-force taking aim at confinement, stateliness and bourgeois materialism.

This final action sends the heart soaring. It also clarifies the film’s unifying theme: the impulse toward freedom. The first step in the dancing out of this theme actually predates the film’s action: the escape of the three Americans from the United States. Each is differently motivated. Guy is weary of work; he wants to get away from the ardor of rehearsing and performing. We intuit this when, ironically, he most reluctantly consents to performing a dance at the Parisian nightclub at the film’s opening. Now that he has Mimi, though, he can return to the States, and to his profession, refreshed. Mimi has something else to escape: an unhappy marriage. We learn why the marriage is a bad one. We infer from her husband’s deceit and bigamy Mimi’s loneliness in her marriage, and we also sense, I believe, a discrepancy between the passion that fulfills her husband—he is a geologist—and the lack of any like interest in her life. With Guy, Mimi will now have such an interest: dance. Two lonely individuals have become a team, and their partnership in dance, ridding them of their loneliness and sense of incompletion, functions as a metaphor for the companionship that mediates between lonely lives and eternity. The twenty-minute Continental number, one of the most spectacular and satisfying of all film musical numbers, represents another escape for Guy and Mimi—from all the nonsense that they must go through for her to win her escape from this unhappy marriage of hers and to win the freedom, now that she is in love with Guy, to enter a happy union with Guy. The dance, with Mimi and Guy taking center-stage before disappearing into the crowd of dancers and then reappearing again at the lead, lasts so long precisely because this is their experience of pretend-freedom for which there may be no tomorrow of real freedom. The length of the number becomes an index of how hard they are holding onto what may be their one night together—an index, that is, of their love for one another and their desire to be free for and with one another. Finally, there is foolish Aunt Hortense, with many failed marriages to her résumé, who is currently between marriages. She, though, marries Egbert, an old flame; Hortense, unlike her niece and Guy, will remain in England. Her loneliness, which the trip with Mimi was intended to assuage, now may be permanently given the boot—except that, to poignant effect, we suspect that she and Egbert have less of a chance at marriage (given his heretofore confirmed bachelorhood, his immature relationship with his unseen father, and Hortense’s multiple tries at marriage) than Guy and Mimi have. (It’s not a good sign that Egbert has to remind Hortense that they got married the night before!)

The almost consistently hilarious script is by George Marion, Jr., Dorothy Yost and Edward Kaufman, with Robert Benchley, uncredited, also contributing. (Benchley would appear with Rogers in Billy Wilder’s 1942 The Major and the Minor, where she breaks an egg on his head.) The writers based their script on an unpublished play by J. Hartley Manners (it’s possible; somebody could be named that) and the stage musical The Gay Divorce, from whose Porter score only “Night and Day” was used. This play was written by Dwight Taylor, Kenneth S. Webb and Samuel Hoffenstein. (U.S. censors disallowed the play’s title for the film; a divorce couldn’t be gay, they insisted.) The Oscar-winning song “The Continental” was composed by Con Conrad, with lyrics by Herb Magidson. The choreographer for this extravagant ensemble is Dave Gould, with Hemes Pan and Astaire himself (both uncredited) contributing to the Astaire-Rogers part of the dance and the other Astaire-Rogers dances.

One of these dances, the one to “Night and Day,” is grave, sensuous, hypnotic, haunting. Many have noted that Guy seems to be playing Svengali to Mimi’s Trilby; Mimi seems completely under his spell. But when they are unexpectedly dancing toward the camera, with Mimi’s glazed eyes staring ahead, it is as if Mimi were also under our spell—one of the most electrifying uses of camera in a film dance ever. In the couple’s last dance before leaving for America, when they are dancing over dinette table and chairs, Guy has a firm grip on Mimi, whose feet (I presume, because of her insufficient height) don’t touch the chairs either as the couple go up to the table or come down from it. The eroticism of “Night and Day” at night, then, comes to fruition in stunning daylight at the end, and one can only wonder whether Alfred Hitchcock had the scene in mind when Scottie is dragging Judy up the bell tower stairs in Vertigo (1958). Anyone watching Mimi’s suspended feet, as Guy swiftly moves her along, who doesn’t feel a thrill is likely dead between the legs. What a moment!

The Gay Divorcée deserved its Oscar nomination as best picture—and it just as deservedly lost to Frank Capra’s wonderful It Happened One Night.