Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 222: Fri Aug 11

Merrily We Go to Hell (Arzner, 1942): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 6.20pm


This film, part of the Big Screen Classics strand at BFI Southbank, is also being shown on August 23rd when the film will be introduced by film journalist Helen O'Hara.

Time Out review:
Part voguish 'sophisticated' satire, part domestic melodrama, this film from the Lubitsch era at Paramount is a curious but highly entertaining hybrid. Frederic March, a journalist and would-be playwright with a heartbreak in his past and a liking for the bottle, woos and weds Sylvia Sidney's heiress, and we follow their 'matrimony modern style' through better and worse, richer and poorer, sickness and health, up to a dubiously happy ending of which Douglas Sirk would have been proud. As befits a film by Hollywood's foremost female 'auteur', all the male characters are hopelessly immature; yet the women rarely transcend movie types.
Paul Taylor

Here (and above) is the trailer.

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