À tort et à travers

Bryant Washburn and Mildred Davis are getting married. Washburn has a theory about marriage that he persuades Mildred to put into effect: the Eternal Courtship. He'll show up for two hours each Wednesday with a bunch of flowers and stay for a couple of hours. Thus, their relationship will never become stale. Everyone who knows about this thinks it as stupid an idea as I do. Mildred tells her friend, Margaret Livingston, that Washburn, who is a salesman, is out of town a lot.

Theories about marriage and relationships keep shifting all the time. Certainly, in the last two decades they've changed. In the era of this movie, people talked about "companionate marriage", which meant no children. This is a sort of anti-companionate marriage; one of the plots has Washburn finding his wife has been knitting baby clothes.

This is a comedy with a normative viewpoint, set up to fail from its very beginning, with a title that proclaims that end. As a result, despite some talented performers and some moderately amusing sequences, it is the cinematic embodiment of its own title.