The Bride Walks Out

Engineer Gene Raymond gets a new job that pays all of $35 a week, so he gets married to dress model Barbara Stanwyck and makes her quit her $50-a-week job. But they can't make a go on his salary. But there's Robert Young, son of a rich department store owner standing by to scoop up the lady.

It's typical of the romantic comedies that RKO was releasing at this juncture, with a serious problem flooded under the fluffy goo of attractive leads and lots of nutty supporting comics to offer the laughs. There's Ned Sparks and Helen Broderick as their married pals; Willie Best, Billy Gilbert, and Hattie MacDaniels; Irving Bacon; Fred Kelsey as a cop, of course; Charles Lane looking only about 50; and the usual assortment of people who can be counted on to speak a serious or funny line well. It's the sort of bread-and-butter picture that might show a profit, or simply account for some of the fixed costs of the studio and make the ones that showed a profit more profitable.

Pure romantic comedy that doesn't hit every mark, but is well worth it. If you loved Palm Beach Story, you'll at least like this.

Story of fashion-model married to $35/week surveyor, failing to make ends meet. He won't let her work, but she does anyway. She's tempted by rich playboy Robert Young. He's egged on by wife-hating Ned Sparks. Sparks, who delivers every line around a cigar stub, and Billy Gilbert, the repo man, steal every scene they are in.

Husband's refusal to see wife's point of view makes him look stupid, which was not the intent. Guess how it turns out? True lovers of this period have to learn to overlook this kind of sexism, I'm afraid.

This is a very dated story about two people in love, Barbara Stanwyck and Gene Raymond, and their marital problems. Stanwyck plays a model who came from a poor home, and she doesn't want to give up her $50 a week job and live on only Raymond's $35/week salary. He talks her into it anyway, though she screams all the way down the aisle. Soon she finds herself in money trouble and gets involved with a playboy, Robert Young. To ease her financial problems, she works on the sly.

The performances are delightful, but it's a slim story and then there's the business of this guy not wanting his wife to work. I normally don't have a problem watching films in the context of their times, but in this case, the husband seemed unreasonable to me. Ned Sparks and Helen Broderick are hilarious. Stanwyck is always fresh and sincere. Gene Raymond is attractive, but I've always failed to see why he was so important to MGM that Mayer forced Jeannette Macdonald to marry him. The film didn't really hold my interest, but Stanwyck is always worth seeing.

Although this film was made before the television era, in some ways it resembles an extended episode of a TV sitcom. The main characters are Michael and Carolyn Martin, a young newlywed couple from New York. The plot centres upon the disharmony caused in their marriage by their financial difficulties. Michael is an engineer earning $35 per week. In the Depression era of the thirties this would probably have been regarded by most Americans as a good living wage, but it is not enough to keep Carolyn in the middle-class style to which she has become accustomed. Before her marriage she worked as a model earning $50 per week, but Michael has old-fashioned views about married women working (old-fashioned by today's standards if not those of the thirties) and refuses to let her go out to work. Carolyn, however, is unable to limit her spending (she impulsively buys a dress costing over $40) and soon the couple are in financial difficulties and their furniture is repossessed. An added complication is that Carolyn has a wealthy admirer in the shape of Hugh, the foppish son of a department-store owner. (At least, he is a fop some of the time. His character seems to veer between a drunken playboy and a perfect gentlemen).

The film resembles a sitcom in that the humour arises out of the situations in which the characters find themselves rather than from any particularly witty dialogue. As another reviewer has pointed out, the main comic relief is provided by Billy Gilbert as the repo man and Ned Sparks as Michael's colleague Paul, but as Gilbert's party piece seems to be pretending to sneeze (in which he is joined in a duet by Barbara Stanwyck) and Sparks's speciality is talking out of the side of his mouth while holding a cigar firmly clamped between his jaws, I can only think that audiences of the thirties were more easily pleased than those of today would be.

The main problem with this film for a modern audience, however, is its outdated social attitudes. The jocular references to wife-beating, for example, do not seem tasteful or funny today. Although the film is fairly sympathetic to Carolyn's desire to work, a woman's job is seen not in terms of a fulfilling career but in terms of a way of providing pocket-money to keep herself in luxuries. There is also a racist joke when Carolyn's maid (about the only role open to black actresses in the thirties) remarks that black men are too idle to support themselves and prefer to live off their wives. The film as a whole seems very dated today. "Halliwell's Film Guide" describes it as "thin" but "pleasing". The first adjective may be apt; the second certainly is not. 4/10

If you can get passed the far-outdated trappings (newlyweds in separate beds, and a wife who is forced to give up her well-paying job to live on her husband's measly salary), there are some laughs to be had in this charming romantic comedy from RKO. Screenwriters P.J. Wolfson and Philip G. Epstein, working from a story by Howard Emmett Rogers, manage to throw in some funny, sneaky little laugh lines, and the supporting characters add a great deal of bounce, including sidekick Ned Sparks (who talks like a Myna Bird) and Hattie McDaniel(s) as a sassy cook. The bride (Barbara Stanwyck, who never disappoints) does indeed walk out--into the arms of a millionaire!--and the way the plot is resolved is amusing and clever. **1/2 from ****