Programme notes CH 04 — The Matinee
Let Us Be Gay
A wife divorced for being dull returns three years later as the most dangerous woman at a Long Island house party.
Shearer made it the same year as The Divorcee, with the same director, and it is that film’s answer turned inside out: the woman who walks out does not suffer for it, she gets better at everything. The first reel is the bravest thing in it. MGM’s most groomed star wakes up in curlers and a shapeless dressing gown, fussing over a husband who has stopped looking at her, and the camera does nothing to rescue her. Then Marie Dressler arrives as a grandmother who hires the new Kitty to break up a romance, and the film becomes a contest of manners that only the two women know they are playing. Watch Dressler whenever Shearer has the scene; she never fights for it, and she takes it anyway.
Credits — follow anyone
- Directed by
- Robert Z. Leonard
- Photographed by
- Norbert Brodine
- With
- Norma Shearer · Marie Dressler · Dickie Moore
Every name is a door — each opens onto everything else that person made in the network.
The thread · every thread
Norma Shearer and Robert Z. Leonard twice in 1930, both times on the morning after a marriage. In one she pays for leaving; in the other she comes back three years later better dressed and holding all the cards.