Fading Fast
Connoisseur
The Office Wife from 1930 with Dorothy MacKaill, Lewis Stone and Joan Blondell
- Early talky and pre-code with element of both that result in an good movie and an even more-interesting look at a moment in movie history
- There's no soundtrack, little action, few sets and a lot of talking - basically, they filmed a souped-up play done in a fast sixty minutes
- The subject is the "office wife" 1930 style: when a high-powered executive forms a bond with his secretary that is stronger and closer than the one with his wife, thus, threatening his marriage
- Stone (who is a bit too old for the role) plays a publishing exec who encourages one of his top authors to write about the "office wife," but then ends up living the experience. To wit, his new wife loses interest in him, in part, owing to his long hours at work, while his new secretary (MacKaill) develops a romantic interest in him (and vice versa)
- The rest is watching it play out - does he leave his wife for the secretary he's falling in love with (especially after he learns his wife is having an affair) and does his secretary leave her decent (if bumptious) boyfriend for her much older and wealthier boss? And since the movie's run time is all of sixty minutes, you don't have to wait long to find out
- Despite its crude, by today's standards, production quality, the story's timelessness engages as does MacKaill, a talented and wanly pretty actress
- But equally interesting are the pre-code curios such as:
- A girl-on-girl, in-their-underwear, kiss (MacKaill and Blondell, see pic below)
- A clearly lesbian author wearing men's-style suits and smoking cigars
- MacKaill's inability to find a single bra to wear
- Booze being readily consumed without condemnation despite Prohibition
- Divorce accepted as just something that happens / not a big deal
- In four short years, when the Motion Picture Production Code would be enforced, most of these situations would be verboten
- Visually, the trip to 1930 is time-travel fun with Stone's outer office a wonderful example of '30s high Art Deco
Pre-code early 1930s enjoying a girl-on-girl kiss (it created a bit of a stir when the TV show Friends had a girl-on-girl kiss in 2001 - this one was seventy-plus years earlier):
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