Up Pops the Devil

Up Pops The Devil was a Broadway play by Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich which ran for 148 performances on Broadway, a most respectable run for the Depression years. It is most dated since it rigidly defines the gender roles of the day. I doubt will see the play revived or the movie remade.

Norman Foster and Carole Lombard are husband and wife. He's an ad man who dabbles in writing, she's your typical homemaker. When he gets a nibble on one of his story ideas he can't work on that exclusively so she goes to work as a showgirl for nightclub owner Theodore Von Eltz. He stays at home and is real unhappy the wife is supporting the household.

They used to entertain a lot, but it turns out Foster can't budget and manage money the way Lombard could. Parties are out, a lot of what they did is out. Both also spark interest from other parties for affairs.

Best in the film is a cameo from Stu Erwin as an inebriated stranger who wanders in off the street because it looks like a good time is to be had.

It's a good film, but it's a museum piece, terribly dated.

After a year of marriage, Carole Lombard takes a job in a chorus line so husband Norman Foster can quit his job and write full time. However, with the traditional roles of breadwinner and homemaker reversed, Foster gets cabin fever. They haven't the money to party with their old friends, and Foster finds it humiliating to have to ask his wife for money. Their marriage explodes.

It's based on a play by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, and director A. Edward Sutherland has not opened up the sets much; it almost all takes place in their one-bedroom apartment. Despite a good cast and some fine comic bits, particularly by Skeets Gallagher, it is far too old-fashioned to be more than a high-brow version of those slapstick two-reelers in which husband and wife swap roles.

It was popular enough in its day. A musical version played on Broadway in the early 1930s and introduced the song "As Time Goes By."

"Up Pops the Devil" is a film with a familiar theme...the incredibly longsuffering wife who gives up everything for her man. Such ridiculously longsuffering women were common in movies in this era...and usually they are mothers such as in "So Big" and "Madam X". Here, however, the woman babies her husband!

When the film begins, Steve (Norman Foster) just got an advance on a novel he's writing. He'd love to be an author...but already has an exceptional job*. His girlfriend, Ann (Carole Lombard), at first refuses to marry Steve...as she thinks she'll get in the way when they marry...and he MUST finish the book. So, she offers him a plan...to marry BUT if he wants out after a year, she'll walk...no questions asked. And, during part of their marriage, money is tight...and Steve's ego cannot handle being a stay at home husband. Soon, not surprisingly, the marriage is on the rocks.

There are a couple annoying things about the film...the dipsomaniac 'friends' who keep dropping by the apartment as well as 'Sleep 'n Eat'. Sleep 'n Eat was a sub-human name the studios gave to Willie Best, and fortunately the name did not stick. But like so many of his roles, he's not exactly an enlightened character, with this black man stealing chicken in one scene! Awful when seen today...pretty normal stuff for 1931.

So should you watch it? Perhaps...though the current copy on YouTube has a huge problem...at about an hour into the film the sound cuts out completely!

*Steve's job pays him about $5200 a year. In 2018 terms, this would be like an $80,000 job...though many married on salaries far, far lower back during the Depression.