Guy is first introduced along with his best pal Egbert "Pinky" Fitzgerald (Edward Everett Horton), an incompetent English lawyer whose own father doesn't trust him to run the family firm. Later, arriving in England after a sojourn to Paris, Guy spies the gorgeous Mimi with her skirt caught in her suitcase and her magnificent legs revealed. It is love at first sight for Guy who begins a relentless pursuit of this lovely but the elusive woman is not interested in being chased. Guy finally tracks Mimi down at the English seaside town of Brightbourne where she is conspiring with her flighty aunt Hortense (Alice Brady) and lawyer Egbert to be caught in flagrante delicto, thus establishing grounds for divorce. Into this delicate plot stumbles Guy and a madcap battle for a happy ending begins.
The combination of smashing musical numbers and loopy comic incident in The Gay Divorcee is best exemplified by the film's opening number ("Don't Let It Bother You") at a Paris nightclub floorshow, where a bevy of beautiful dames on a rotating stage make tiny lady hand puppets dance in chorus line synchronization. Another segment at an English beach resort, "Let's K-Nock K-Neez," is equally eye-popping and boasts an appearance by seventeen-year-old future pin-up queen Betty Grable. Other dance numbers in The Gay Divorcee prove more representative of the magic Astaire/Rogers touch. One of the movie's best numbers "Needle in a Haystack," features Guy's fruitless, obsessed search in London's streets for his dream girl. Equally inventive are the elaborate, glamorous "Continental" number, in which Astaire and Rogers and a plethora of gorgeously turned out dancers trip the light fantastic, and the couple's romantic dance against a backdrop of a glistening nighttime beach to Cole Porter's "Night and Day." In the film's perpetual battle of the sexes, pitting the overzealous Guy against the romance-shy Mimi, the only harmony is achieved during these stunning musical numbers where the couple put aside their quibbles and simply dance.
Meant to capitalize on their success with Flying Down to Rio (1933), The Gay Divorcee was the first time in the team's nine collaborations that they received top billing after having only secondary roles in Rio. Oddly enough, the amount of time the couple spent actually dancing in The Gay Divorcee totals a meager 10 minutes. The pairing of Astaire and Rogers proved enormously advantageous to both of their careers, though Astaire initially resisted being teamed with Rogers again, fearing he would be stuck in a screen couple after only recently ending his longtime collaboration with sister Adele.
Director Mark Sandrich's film was actually based on a Broadway musical by Dwight Taylor and Cole Porter called The Gay Divorce in which Astaire, Erik Rhodes and Eric Blore all appeared. Hollywood's censorship-prone Hays Administration insisted that the title be changed to The Gay Divorcee with the strange reasoning that divorce could not be a happy event, but a divorcee could be happy. Considered one of the best Depression-era musicals, The Gay Divorcee was nominated for a slew of Academy Awards and won the first Best Song Oscar® for that catchy tune, "The Continental." Ironically, another Astaire-Rogers film was nominated that same year for Best Song, the "Carioca" number from Flying Down to Rio.
A publicity stunt for The Gay Divorcee in which RKO organized "Continental" demonstrations and parties never really helped the dance catch on, but one thing in that extravagant number did start a fad. Reportedly, sales of Venetian blinds soared after audiences got a taste of the window treatments in Van Nest Polglase and Carroll Clark's inventive set design.
Director: Mark Sandrich
Producer: Pandro S. Berman
Screenplay: George Marion Jr., Dorothy Yost, Edward Kaufman based on the musical play The Gay Divorce by Dwight Taylor and Cole Porter
Cinematography: David Abel
Production Design: Van Nest Polglase, Carroll Clark
Music: Max Steiner
Cast: Fred Astaire (Guy Holden), Ginger Rogers (Mimi Glossop), Alice Brady (Hortense Ditherwell), Edward Everett Horton (Egbert Fitzgerald), Erik Rhodes (Rodolfo Tonetti), Eric Blore (Waiter), Lillian Miles (Hotel Guest), Charles Coleman (Valet), William Austin (Cyril Glossop), Betty Grable (Hotel Guest).
BW-105m. Closed captioning.
by Felicia Feaster
