They say Paris is the most romantic city, but all the shenanigans in the life of Nancy (Mary Astor) are happening in what she thought was her happy home. When it's hinted her husband Donald (Robert Ames) has been fooling around with blonde social climber Peggy (Noel Francis), a distraught Nancy considers divorce - until her sister-in-law Sally (Ruth Weston) suggests another strategy. Because of the very real temptations faced by women whose mates were overseas, films of the 1940s with an adultery plot (like the Irene Dunne/Cary Grant picture Too Many Husbands (1940)) were often easy titillation for women fancying about choosing between two men. This movie, however, made in the thick of the Great Depression, has a cannier strategy at its core - instead of turning a blind eye, it plays tit for tat. Director Gregory La Cava's expertise on other winking pre-Code pictures like The Half Naked Truth (1932) and The Age Of Consent (1932) helps the proceedings along. Mary Astor would weather her own cheating scandal in real life, when her indiscreet diary was made public during her 1936 divorce.

By Violet LeVoit