(1930. dir: Robert Z. Leonard)
Robert Montgomery is one of the best actors you'll ever see on film. Why isn't remembered, then, outside the narrow boundaries of TCM? Maybe because he never made a really great movie. Every time I see him he astonishes me with his abilities. His face is so responsive an instrument that he can communicate a thought across the room without moving more than the tiniest muscle. His physical discipline is exact in that effortless manner of Cagney or Kirk Douglas. When he plays a serious role, as he later did in his own directorial projects, he has to make concentrated efforts to make himself stoical, and achieves varying levels of success. In his late noir, Ride the Pink Horse, adapted from a work by the great noir writer Dorothy B. Hughes, his portrayal of a bone-weary gunman with nothing left to guide him but vengeance is the more convincing because the mask of stoicism which comes so naturally to a Bogart or a Mitchum takes a toll on him, working toward the overall effect of an exhaustion so great it leads toward despair, even madness.
The Divorcee is one of several films he made with Norma Shearer. It has the high energy of a Fitzgerald story, a great twenties bash with all the dated rompings and laughable slang terms. Then, when it turns to tragedy, it does so with equally high energy. We begin at a country party, where Shearer agrees to marry her playboy beloved (not Montgomery, who is the groom's best friend, a charming roue). Everyone piles into automobiles and barrels back to town, but a jilted beau of Shearer's gets drunk first and drives into tragedy. This scene is wonderfully photographed, the speed and barely-withheld chaos communicated so that it still feels dangerous, more so than any cut-and-dried blow-out you'll see in a Fast and Furious movie.
Shearer is terrible in the beginning, becoming more convincing as her marriage turns serious and complicated. When her husband turns up unfaithful and claims it means nothing at all, she speeds off with Robert Montgomery to "balance the accounts" in a wonderfully rendered series of silent scenes: the two of them drinking in a club while she ponders darkly, the two of them riding in a cab in sensuous but not yet decisive embrace, then a shot of the curtains of a room being pulled shut. The rest of the movie explores how the same fellow who insists his wife disregard his infidelity as a small mistake ruins both their lives from wounded masculine pride when she retaliates. We follow her through the divorce and her lost times, finding her path again and reconciling. The thing is so well directed that even if the thing had a different title we'd know the marriage was doomed from the sepulchral look of her as she's escorted up the aisle, wrapped in veils that seem like shrouds.
Montgomery worked a ton in the thirties and forties. He was often the co-star of choice preferred by the great leading ladies of the time (Shearer, Garbo, Lombard, Crawford), and yet when he is remembered now, it is as the father of Samantha in Bewitched. The Big House, Forsaking All Others, Here Comes Mr. Jordan, Mr. and Mrs. Smith: he shines in all of them, and yet I wouldn't watch any of them a second time. The only time he ever left me completely cold, in fact, was in the just-post-war They Were Expendable, and you can see my rant about that elsewhere. (Spoiler: like so many things, it's all John Ford's fault.)
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