by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Woman Against Woman is an O.K. soap opera with comic overtones, based
on a story by Margaret Culkin Banning called “Enemy Territory.” It opens with
attorney Stephen Holland (Herbert Marshall) feeling immensely put-upon by his
wife Cynthia (Mary Astor). He wants them to find a smaller and cozier place to
live; she insists on them remaining where they are. He wants to keep Dora
(Sarah Padden), the nurse who raised him during his own childhood and is now
looking after his daughter Ellen (Juanita Quigley, yet another of the Shirley
Temple wanna-bes that clogged casting offices in the 1930’s), but she insists
she won’t work another day under the same house as Cynthia. Eventually Stephen
and Cynthia have an argument and, though they’re relatively genteel about it,
he insists that he’s not going to stay another night under her roof, moves out
and announces his intention to file for divorce. This is complicated by the
fact that Stephen’s mother (Janet Beecher) is on Cynthia’s side. But after five
years (that’s how long the script tells us they’ve been married, though Juanita
Quigley looks more like about eight than five) Stephen is tired of being
bitched at and ordered about by his wife. He gets an assignment to argue a
patent infringement case before the appellate court in Washington (not the Supreme Court, despite a mistake to that
effect on the imdb.com page) and while he’s there he meets Maris Kent (Virginia
Bruce) and the two fall in love after a weird drinking scene in a hotel room in
which they’re having a good (though Production Code-safe) time and she warbles
a bit of the Cole Porter classic “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” — which Virginia
Bruce had introduced as the bitchy second lead in the Eleanor Powell-James Stewart
musical Born to Dance two
years earlier. They marry — by then he and Cynthia have got legally divorced —
only they have a problem: Stephen’s practice is in the small town where he and
Cynthia are living, and the town’s other married women join forces with Cynthia
and snub Stephen’s new bride. Eventually the cold war between them gets to the
point where Stephen finds himself torn between the two women — he no longer
loves Cynthia but wants a modus vivendi with her, if only so he can keep seeing his daughter — and Cynthia
finally tries what would now be called “the nuclear option”: she threatens to
move across country so Stephen will never see Ellen again. The film has a
daringly “open” ending for the time; Cynthia backs off her threat, but then
says she’s going through with it after all, and Stephen has to choose between
being a presence in his daughter’s life and staying with his new wife and
making the remarriage work.
In some ways Woman Against Woman is a reworking of Dodsworth, the 1936 screen adaptation of Sinclair Lewis’s
novel, also about a married man torn between an increasingly bitchy wife and
another woman who genuinely and selflessly loves him — though that film had cast Ruth Chatterton as the bitch and
Mary Astor as the nice woman! Astor’s performance is considerably more vicious
than the script necessitated — early on I joked that she was meaner than she’d
been in The Maltese Falcon, in which she played a murderess — and what appeal this film has is
mainly due to the fineness of the acting (and as a Virginia Bruce fan who
thinks she was ill-used by the major studios — her best film by far is the 1934
Monogram version of Jane Eyre — it was nice to see
her get to be the good girl for a change!) even though Herbert Marshall had
played this sort of role many times before (i.e., The Painted Veil) and would play it many times afterwards (i.e., The
Letter). An interesting comment on the film on imdb.com pointed out the multiple marital histories of several of the personnel connected with it: original author Margaret Culkin Banning had two husbands, Herbert Marshall had five wives, Mary Astor three husbands and Virginia Bruce four. “Wow, they sure had the
right cast making this one about divorce and marriage," the reviewer, "ksf-2," said.
