Extravagance

This is an okay movie with an interest conflict and a lot of moral questions. It is pretty believable.

Two wives seem to be unfaithful to their husbands because of their desire for the finer things in life. One of them actually does love her husband. At a running time of just over an hour, the film is quite watchable, especially because of June Collyer's charming performance. Dorothy Christy is also good as the not so loving wife.

The ending is very preachy and moralistic, but somehow pretty satisfying.

Marriages were one of the main topics in movies of this time period. Good marriages versus bad marriages were a common motif and this one provides a different slant on it.

There is a marvelous scene where Collyer and her husband sit down to eat breakfast and because of hurt feelings between them have nothing to say to each other. The husband turns on the radio. We hear a very well done spoof of a radio commercial. This is certainly one of the first movies to portray the medium of radio. For that alone it has historical value.

Also, I really liked Collyer's reaction to being slandered as a gold-digger. She does not take it well at all. Like most pre-codes, this shows that women were feisty and had their own minds and opinions at this point in history.

The film begins with Alice getting married. However, this 'romantic' lady announces to her friends that this isn't going to slow her down--she STILL is a party-girl! And, after the newness of marriage fads, Alice is out chasing other men and living a life well beyond her poor husband's ability to pay for--despite having a very lucrative job during the Depression.

This is one of the best examples of a Pre-Code film I have seen. That's because before the Production Code was strengthened in mid-1934, Hollywood films were chock full of VERY adult content. For example, despite what you might think, nudity, graphic violence, cursing, adultery and the like were not that uncommon pre-1934. In "Extravagance", the notion of adultery is glorified--with all the female leads in the film running around on their men and having a jolly nice time! While some films with similar topics like "Red-Headed Woman" are enjoyable to watch, however, this film just irritated me. That's because most Pre-Code films managed to be entertaining--often because the leads, though immoral, were humorous or engaging. Here, however, the married women just seemed like bad AND stupid people. Plus, it's hard to like women who are rich and spoiled--especially when the Depression was at its worst. With other Pre-Code film, often the women slept around to get ahead in life--these women already had it all and wanted more. I don't know, but this sure made it hard for me to keep watching.

Reasonably well-acted, this film never managed to strike a balance between irony and humor and just featured detestable women. As a result, it just wasn't that entertaining to me.

To contradict with most of the reviews - the heroine, Alice (June) isn't as bad as implied. Probably, as the mother said in the end, she didn't know the best. Alice is a spoilt girl of a rich family, and after the father has died, and the income has become nil, the mother didn't put any check on her lifestyle.

To be fair on her, she didn't seem to know the ground condition, whether her mother living on pension given by Fred, or even that Fred's business has become bankrupt. When she came to know she rushed to sell her cherished Sable to pay Fred's charities. That's not selfishness, though spoilt, she was undoubtedly. Fred did try to put some check, but he was too much in love to act tough.

The suspicion raising its ugly head was natural, under the circumstances, and one can't fault Fred on that. How would he know that unlike Esther, Alice adored her husband ? The decision to divorce and even go with Morell was the strong indignation and rebound - again justifiable - since till then she didn't so anything against Haye's Code (though Esther did) and she didn't know that the fisrt $2K and later $32K were all advances from Morell, and not really gain from the game of chance. Though I wondered while watching why did Morell change his spots ? His decision to marry Alice after her Paris divorce doesn't go with his character.

Not as bad, since the characters are not as unbelievable or selfish or creepy as hinted in reviews, here as well as elsewhere (in fact that portrayel made me delay watching it). The people were generally believable, with the usual shortcomings, may be a bit more in Morell, but they do exist aplenty in real life.

Probably the movie would have been a bit better if it was stretheched a bit more at least another 15 minutes to preferably half an hour, since some times it went a bit fast and considering the actors, at least as they acted here, they could easily have managed that extra time, without making it an eyesore. This probably is the major negative point.

June Collyer has just married Lloyd Hughes and they are very happy at first. After about a year, he complains of her extravagance and asks her to watch her expenses; he needs to save capital because the bank is hesitant about renewing his loan. Eventually she decides she can get a sable coat the way Dorothy Christy has: as a gift from Jameson Thomas.

I found the movie one of those possessed of the uncertainty of film makers still trying to move from the silent to the sound era: stretches of time during which a character walks from the left of the screen to the middle, and dialogue written as if the audience needs to be reminded of whom the characters are: "Oh Fred," "Dorothy" and so forth. People are far too careful in speaking, an artefact of the still poor sound systems available, or at least the uncertainty of people like director Phil Rosen, who had begun as a cameraman, about whether this sound stuff was here to stay.

That said, and despite the simplicity of the story, I found the visuals well covered. Tiffany, which still apparently had great ambitions to join the majors, had been producing the occasional color film or extravaganza for some time. The company had been formed in 1921 by Mae Murray and husband Robert Z. Leonard to produce films distributed through Metro. By 1925 they had divorced and gone away, but John Stahl took over in 1927 and began an ambitious expansion program that eventually included a distribution network of 2500 theaters. The studio tackled sound and color boldly, but by 1930 Stahl had left and in 1932 the company declared bankruptcy.