A romantic comedy with early screwball tendencies, starring Gloria Swanson as Geraldine "Gerri" Trent, a fairly well-to-do fashion designer. It's New Year's Eve as Gerri breaks up with Jim Woodward (Monroe Owsley), who is handsome, slick, dapper, pleasant, and completely untrustworthy. She knows he's been carrying on with lots of other women, and hands him his hat. He keeps acting as if he doesn't understand (or accept) that she's kicking him out. He doesn't deny that he's been unfaithful, and protests that it's the male prerogative: "After all, a man must live..." Calmly she replies, "I've often wondered why it was necessary. In some cases." She calls him back, he gloats, she hands him his golf clubs and sends him packing. This scene works partly because Owsley gives us a caricature of the vain,arrogant, inconstant male, and partly because Swanson is so composed and drily witty as she dumps him. Soon after she's fallen in love with Tony Blake (Ben Lyon), a charming novelist, and things go swimmingly until he expresses some reservations about a woman with a history, and she grows afraidand farcical plot complications begin. Gerri has a young sister, Joan (Barbara Kent), just returning from two years at school in Europe, and she's got a secret. She's just gotten herself engagedto the skunk Woodward. The rest of the movie unwinds around attempts to keep Tony from finding out about her past, and to keep Joan from marrying Woodward.. Everything crashes when Gerri tries to separate them by feigning insanityit's quite amusingand then by pretending to be in love with Woodward still. It works, but Tony sees and storms out of her life. Everything ends happily after a madcap rush to a departing ship. Swanson tries hard to do everythingto be a cynical dame, a rapturous young woman in love, a glamorous member of high societyand so she cracks jokes, runs about and indulges in slapstick, sighs heavily and swoons romantically, gives terrifying angry looks, and she even sings. Three times. Her voice is good enough, but it seems a little shrill for the material, and at the same time blandor maybe that's just the songs she was given. Also noteworthy are two minor characters, Joan's gangly first suitor Buster (Arthur Lake), who seems to be growing out of his clothes at every minute and possesses a wonderful rolling gait that threatens to overbalance him. And there's also Aunt Kate (Maude Ebern), one of the greatest of the stock aunt figures, a comic foil, provider of good counsel, and source of comic undercutting of social pretension.
Review of Indiscreet
