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.

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

One of Barbara Stanwyck's lesser efforts, The Bride Walks Out gets in a few jabs about chauvinistic pride but with little velocity behind its screwball intent it never reaches home plate.

Mike and Carolyn get hitched and he immediately puts his foot down about her working outside the home. As the bills mount she takes a job on the side to stem the tide of debt collectors but he finds out and the couple split. Miserable without each other they shakily attempt to reconcile.

Save for the abrasive Gene Raymond as Mike, Bride fields a decent enough acting squad with Babs, Robert Young as a well heeled interloper and a broad comic support line of Ned Sparks, Helen Broderick, Hattie Mc Daniel and Billy Gilbert. But lightweight director Leigh Jason fails to get cast or tempo out of its lethargy and the Bride Walks Out deserves one itself.

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 ****

Bride Walks Out, The (1936)

** (out of 4)

Disappointing film from RKO has Barbara Stanwyck playing fashion model Carolyn who is courted by a blue collar working man (Gene Raymond). The two are married and he forces her to quit her job as he thinks they can survive on his $35-a-week paycheck but soon she goes to work behind his back and is courted by a rich man (Robert Young) who is in love with her. THE BRIDE WALKS OUT starts off pretty flat and just continues to go downhill from there. Despite the good cast there's really no life in this comedy-drama for a number of reasons but the biggest has to be the lack of chemistry between Stanwyck and Raymond. Not for a second did they feel like a real married couple and throughout the movie I had a hard time believing these two people would ever actually be together. Another problem is the screenplay, which for some reason makes the husband out to be the dumbest man I've seen from any Hollywood film of the 1930s. I watch dozens, if not hundreds, of films from this era and for the life of me I was struggling to come up with a dumber male character. The film has a very sexist attitude about it, which goes against many of the roles Stanwyck played throughout the decade but there are several bits of dialogue where it's said that for a man to be "manly" that he should hit a woman. Add on more sexist stuff including the fact that he doesn't believe women should work and that he's constantly doing and saying one dumb thing after another, the viewer really can't help but hate the guy and want to see Stanwyck get away from him. The one good thing in the film is the chemistry between Stanwyck and Young but you'll be disappointed in how the screenplay plays this off in the end but what's an even bigger head-scratcher is that it's never really explained why Young becomes such a vital part in her life. Ned Sparks tries to add some comic relief and fails and film buffs will also enjoy seeing Hattie McDaniel and Billy Gilbert in small roles. You can also quickly see Willie Best at a court sequence but he's not given a single line of dialogue. This attractive cast might make fans tune in when the film is shown on TCM but you're bound to be disappointed.