No Other Woman

Steel mill worker's daughter Irene Dunne marries mill hand Charles Bickford. He eventually becomes a rich owner of a dye works and takes on New York mistress Gwili Andre. When Miss Andre insists on marriage and Miss Dunne refuses him a divorce, witnesses lie that she is the one having an affair.

It looks as ifthis movie had been more ambitious at one point; certainly, the marriage reception, which looks very Polish, shows the attention to detail that director J. Walter Ruben liked to take. But its short length -- impelled by Slavko Vorkapich's transitional montages -- keep it too brisk for anyone to get any real flavor out of its bite-sized portions. With Eric Linden, Christian Rub, Leila Bennet, and J. Carrol Naish.

Irene Dunne stars as a factory-town woman who wants a better life (like Barbara Stanwyck in Stella Dallas, Katharine Hepburn in Alice Adams and Joan Crawford in Possessed). She's in love with factory worker Charles Bickford. They marry and she runs a boarding house to make extra money. One of the boarders is a shy immigrant (Eric Linden) who has discovered a great new dye. Dunne talks Bickford into throwing in their savings and open a dye works. They become rich. But Bickford travels a lot and falls into the clutches of a bad woman (Gwili Andre) who wants more than money: marriage.

The court room finale is a doozy with J. Carroll Naish playing a sleazy (Italian in this case) lawyer who has cooked up a scheme to get his girl friend (Andre) married to Bickford. So they line up a bunch of false witnesses against Dunne. But Dunne turns the tables when they try to grab custody of the baby as well. Excellent plot twist.

Dunne is one of the greats, and she's terrific here too. She's even believable as a factory-town girl. Bickford is an acquired taste and I never liked him as a "leading man." Linden is good is his usual "soft" role. And Naish is always fun to hate. Leila Bennett, Hilda Vaughn, and Christian Rub co-star.

No Other Woman is famous as the film that derailed Danish Gwili Andre's career because her character is so nasty. She battled for another decade to regain a foothold in films but only landed small parts. She committed suicide in 1959 by surrounding herself with publicity photos and press clippings and setting them and herself on fire.

No Other Woman is sure one misnomer of a title. This rather dated soap opera has Charles Bickford caught between two of them.

First there's Irene Dunne, his wife who saw him through the lean years as he starts a new steel business with young chemist Eric Linden and bore his son Buster Miles. But Bickford never quite changed his partying ways and now that he's rich he carouses on a grander scale.

Enter Gwili Andre a slinky society minx who gets his mojo going and when Bickford's libido is aroused he's obeying what's coming from below decks.

Given the liberalization of divorce laws now, this film is quaintly old fashioned and a lot of younger viewers might not understand what's going on. But back in the day you had to prove allegations made in court and a lot of dirty linen got exposed. Then as now a lot of shaky allegations were made.

Irene Dunne is the noble wife who is ready to defend home and hearth from the intruder in court or anywhere else. A most typical role for her. The climax is the divorce case brought on by Bickford and his lawyer J. Carrol Naish. Naish really steals the film in the end as the kind of shyster that lawyer jokes are made out.

No Other Woman is dated and quaint, but still good entertainment.

You have to judge this film in the context of how it was exhibited back in 1933. This hour-long film was not RKO's attempt at a main exhibit - that would have been something along the lines of that year's "Flying Down to Rio". All of the studios made short little films like this as filler for matinees - much like afternoon TV programming.

The film starts out with a young steel town couple Jim and Anna Stanley (Charles Bickford and Irene Dunne) just before they get married. Anne has big dreams of getting away from the mills, Jim is content to go along as things are. After they marry, Anna takes in boarders and saves up Jim's sizable paychecks so they can get "out of this place", although at the time she doesn't have a plan. Her chance comes when quiet and studious boarder Joe Zarcovia (Eric Linden) comes up with a chemical process for making dye from waste from the steel making process. For some reason, Anna seems to believe that her big hunk of steel-making husband is a genius at business and that he can make a fortune from this formula. Given we only have 58 minutes for our story, of course she is right. Thus the chemist and the Stanleys go into business together and soon are fabulously rich. The Stanleys have everything, including a little son. Unfortunately, in the case of Jim, you can take the man out of steel-town but you can't take the steel-town of the man. Soon he's on a spree that involves heavy drinking, another woman that for some reason insists on marriage rather than just the cushy kept-woman lifestyle she has in New York City, and then the business begins to suffer.

This film is so short that quite a few things don't make sense. For one thing, the message of the picture seems to be that the Stanleys are made for each other regardless of what happens, in spite of the fact that these two seem to be two very different people who want very different things out of life. Anna is supposed to be the epitome of a loyal woman, although considering what she's put through by her husband she seems more like a doormat by the end of the film. Then there is Jim's golden business acumen that seems to come out of nowhere - he has done manual labor his whole life and probably didn't even finish high school.

From a historical standpoint, I found one fact to be just plain ironic. In the beginning of the film, Anna is sitting on the porch of her little "company town" house telling Jim how she didn't want to be just another generation in generations of steel town wives. She talks about how if she and Jim got married all they would have to look forward to is a house supplied by the company and Jim employed by the mill doing the same thing until he retired. Although she seems to think this is all very dull, how much so many people living in these now largely abandoned steel towns today would give to have this kind of "dullness" brought back to their lives - a guarantee of a living wage throughout their adult lives with some degree of loyalty by their employer.

This one is worth your time if it comes your way - just don't expect "Gone With the Wind".

No Other Woman (1933)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

A poor married couple (Irene Dunne, Charles Bickford) get rich after making a steel dye but then their marriage starts to fall apart due to him finding a mistress in New York. There's nothing overly special about this film but it runs a fast 58-minutes, which is almost a tad bit too much time. The story is very predictable right down to the showdown in court towards the end. The real reason to watch this is due to the performances of Dunne and Bickford. The two have a lot of chemistry together and make for a great couple. Bickford steals the show as the iron hard man who doesn't know what to do when he gets all that money. J. Carrol Naish has a small role. Previously filmed in 1918 and 1925.