"I've been taking care of myself. Trying to recapture my lost youth. Exercise, you know? Seven beautiful thoughts before breakfast, bursting into song at unexpected moments. I'm a changed man."
Claudette Colbert is absolutely gorgeous and she plays her scenes of emotional conflict well, but the story has too many unpleasant aspects to truly like this film. Frederic March is an alpha businessman carrying on with a lot of women with no intentions of marrying (he calls the institution "bunk"). He puts the moves on his secretary (Colbert) and when she resists, he goes off to screw someone else for hours, missing an entire football game in the process. He can't stop thinking about his secretary, however, so Monday morning he says he'll marry her if it means that much to her, but when she informs him that she just got married (to a stock broker played by Monroe Owsley), he fires her on the spot despite her stellar performance in the office. And this, naturally, is ultimately going go to be the protagonist, helped along by his impossible-to-believe transformation and an all-too-convenient implosion from the stock broker.
Had it gone in a different direction at a few moments in the story, including late when a somewhat surprising event occurs, it could have been brilliant, but the film plays it safe, and didn't really feel pre-Code. The virtuous woman never gives in to premarital sex, the womanizing alpha male should have been her choice all along because he's successful and can be trusted to do the right thing (ha!), and divorce is justified by an avalanche of reprehensible things the husband does. These are cartoon characters. On top of it, the small part of a dimwitted woman (Ginger Rogers, argh) is spoken to like a child each time she's on the screen. But hey, it's worth seeing for Colbert.
