The Divorcée (MGM, 1930)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, October 28), as soon as my husband Charles got back home from work, I turned off the news and switched the TV to Turner Classic Movies, which was doing a night of films made during the so-called “pre-Code” era of Hollywood history from 1930 to 1934. The term “pre-Code” is a spectacular misnomer because the Motion Picture Production Code was actually promulgated in March 1930 by the Motion Picture Producers’ and Distributors’ Association (MPPDA), and therefore pre-dated the “pre-Code” era. The Code was instituted to ward off both government censorship of the motion picture industry (which was perfectly legal because in 1912 the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled that movies were just “a business” and therefore films were not a form of “speech” protected by the First Amendment; the Court eventually reversed this, but not until 1953) and the efforts of private pressure groups to drive certain forms of content off the screen. But for the first four years of its existence the Production Code was enforced more loosely than it was thereafter, and a surprising number of films made it to the screen that dealt with sexual relationships in a relatively honest and open fashion. One of those was the film Charles and I watched last night, The Divorcée, made at MGM in 1930 and based on a racy novel called Ex-Wife, published in 1929, whose content was so controversial that its author, Ursula Parrott, originally did not put her name on the book. The MPPDA ordered MGM to change the film’s title to something less offensive and in-your-face, so MGM obliged with The Divorcée. When MGM production chief Irving Thalberg bought the rights for $20,000 (a high price for a story property then), he intended to cast Joan Crawford in the title role, but Thalberg’s wife, Norma Shearer, had other ideas. She announced to her husband that she wanted to play the female lead, and eventually she got her wish – leading to a bitter enmity between her and Crawford that lasted until their one film together, The Women (1939), and even beyond. Crawford complained to her friends, “How can I compete with Norma? She sleeps with the boss!” Thalberg was originally uncertain about casting Shearer because she’d carefully been built up as a “good girl,” though at least two of her silent films, Lady of the Night (1925) – in which she played two parts, one good and one bad – and A Lady of Chance (1928), had showcased her in less than sympathetic roles.

The Divorcée casts Shearer as Jerry, who’s in love with Ted Martin (Chester Morris, a highly talented actor who got a number of good parts in great films but never quite achieved the brass ring of stardom his talents deserved), even though Jerry is a successful businesswoman (though we’re never told just what business she’s in) and Ted is a struggling newspaperman. Ted and Jerry talk a good game about wanting a truly equal relationship and avoiding the pitfalls of traditional jealousy, but not long after they’re married Ted is confronted at one of the film’s many parties by Janice (Mary Doran), one of his exes who wants to get rid of the “ex” part. One of the parties ends with a sequence in which the Martins’ friend Paul (Conrad Nagel, a dubious actor who got a lot of parts he didn’t deserve in the early days of sound because he was one of the first actors who proved he had a recordable speaking voice; it got so bad that in an interview Nagel complained that he and his wife could no longer go to the movies for their own entertainment because they couldn’t find anything playing that he wasn’t in) gets roaring drunk and insists on driving while very much under the influence. The inevitable happens and Paul’s car crashes, leaving his girlfriend Dorothy (Judith Wood, billed as “Helen Johnson”) severely injured and disfigured. There’s a neat contrast between the wedding of Ted and Jerry in a church with Wagner’s Lohengrin march and a minister performing the ceremony, and the sordid coupling of Paul and Dorothy in Dorothy’s hospital room, since Paul doesn’t love Dorothy but feels compelled to marry her out of guilt.

At yet another party Janice successfully seduces Ted, and Jerry, figuring that what’s sauce for the gander should be sauce for the goose, yields to the advances of another one of their friends, Don (the young Robert Montgomery, who’s so callow-looking we get the impression he’s just graduated from high school). Director Robert Z. Leonard (who’s not credited as such, though the opening title lists The Divorcée as “A Robert Z. Leonard Production”), who was ordinarily a hack (though he has one truly great film on his résumé, the 1937 Jeanette MacDonald/Nelson Eddy musical Maytime), shows a rare bit of subtlety when he works around the Code’s limitations by staging the sex scene between Jerry and Don from outside, with just the camera on the window of their apartment as its drapes slowly close. Leonard also scores with the immediately preceding scene, in which Ted, called out of town on a business trip (though once again we’re not told what sort of business or why he can’t take Jerry along, as Charles invariably does with me whenever he has to go out of town), tries to call home during a six-minute layover of his train. Only it takes nearly the whole six minutes just for him to put through the call, and we get a chilling scene of the Martins’ phone ringing unanswered because Jerry has just that minute yielded to Don’s advances and left home with him. When Ted finally returns from his trip, Jerry announces that she has “paid your account in full,” and Ted immediately demands to know who her extra-relational lover was – while she, quite understandably, refuses to tell him.

Ted and Jerry divorce, and Jerry announces that from then on she’s going to be as wanton as circumstances will allow and have as many men in her life as she wants. Among the men after her is Paul (ya remember Paul?), who’s never forgiven Ted because he married Jerry after Paul wanted her. He catches up with her on a train and pulls her away from her latest boy-toy, a phony European “prince,” then offers to marry her as soon as he can divorce Dorothy, to whom he’s offered a large financial settlement in exchange for his freedom. Only, just as Jerry and Paul are in Jerry’s apartment settling the details of their new life together, Dorothy shows up wearing what after an earlier viewing of the film (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2009/07/divorcee-mgm-1930.html) I described as “an elaborate hood over her head that makes her look like a cross between a Ku Klux Klansman and a burka-clad Muslim woman.” Naturally Jerry is too overcome by guilt to go through with her plan to marry Paul, and instead she leaves for Paris, where Ted (ya remember Ted?) is working as a free-lance journalist after having been fired from his job. He’s also drinking a lot and making an ass of himself, something he was already well on his way to doing in the U.S. when he disrupted the wedding party of two of their friends and even smashed their wedding cake. It all ends in Paris at a New Year’s Eve party where Jerry and Ted finally reconcile and pledge that this time around they’ll take the marriage vows more seriously than they did last time. TCM showed The Divorcée October 28 as part of a night of so-called “pre-Code” films in connection with a new book on the 1930-34 era called Pre-Code Essentials: Must-See Cinema from Hollywood’s Untamed Era 1930-1934 by Kim Luperi and Danny Reid, which featured The Divorcée in its opening chapter.

And yet both Charles and I could think of much better movies from the 1930-34 period that pushed the envelope far more audaciously than this rather staid film, which at least partly because of Shearer’s usual image is hard to take seriously. You just know that Jerry isn’t a truly bad or wanton woman, just a good woman playing at being bad – and playing at being bad in a transparently phony way. Shearer would go on to make a few more films that pushed the envelope of traditional morality, including Private Lives (1931) – in which, given a better story source (by Noël Coward instead of Ursula Parrott) and a more artful director (Sidney Franklin), she and Robert Montgomery play the basic situation of The Divorcée as sophisticated comedy instead of chest-thumping melodrama – and A Free Soul (also 1931), in which she plays the daughter of attorney Lionel Barrymore who’s engaged to Leslie Howard but is turned on sexually by brutal gangster Clark Gable. (I’ve sometimes described A Free Soul as the beta version of Gone With the Wind because, though it has nothing to do with the Civil War, it is a two-man-one-woman triangle with Gable and Howard as the two men.) And other studios and other stars also made far more Code-pushing films in the early 1930’s than this one. To name but a few, there are Three Smart Girls (1932), Virtue (1932), the awesome Call Her Savage (1932), Trouble in Paradise (1932), Love Me Tonight (1932) – to my mind the best movie musical ever made – Safe in Hell (1933), Sensation Hunters (1933), and Mae West’s masterpieces She Done Him Wrong and I’m No Angel (both 1933). West’s films in particular sparked the reaction from the Roman Catholic pressure group, the Legion of Decency (that name says it all!), that ended the relative freedom of the so-called “pre-Code” era and forced the MPPDA to get super-serious about enforcing the Code. They put a single individual – first Jason Joy, then Joseph Breen, then Geoffrey Shurlock (who held the job until the Code finally broke down in the late 1960’s and was replaced by the ratings system in place today) – in charge and gave him the power to vet films twice, first when they were in script form and then after they were shot. The Divorcée is a frustrating movie that seems hopelessly dated in some respects and au courant in others, and Shearer won the Academy Award for her performance, which like the film itself is powerful and luminous in some scenes and staid and stiff in others.