Merrily We Go to Hell

Dorothy Arzner, the only female director who worked steadily in Hollywood during the nineteen-thirties, begins this 1932 melodrama with a young woman fighting off the groping and kissing of an older man at a Chicago high-society party. A local reporter and aspiring playwright named Jerry (Fredric March) drunkenly observes these aggressions from the terrace and, when the woman, an industrial heiress named Joan (Sylvia Sidney), comes out for air, playfully makes himself a nuisance; the pair fall instantly in love and, rebelling against her father (George Irving), she marries him. But Jerry is an alcoholic (Prohibition is no deterrent; the city is awash in drink) who’s also still in love with his ex, a brassy and scheming actress named Claire (Adrianne Allen). Arzner perches the blithe whirl of social graces and casual deceit, public norms and private anguish, on a delicate edge of heartbreak; Sidney, already a star at twenty-one, endows the inexperienced but determined Joan with tremulous grace and nerves of steel. — Richard Brody — https://www.newyorker.com/goings-on-about-town/movies/at-long-last-love