I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

one of my absolute favorites!

Excellent, a Must See

if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

Here we have a comedy about 3 American heiresses who married into British aristocracy and how they coped with their loveless marriages. Of the 3, Pearl/Bennett has coped especially well, having made herself the leader of the Smart Set. But her success as a titled lady of leisure is a lot of hard work. While Maugham's story is passe today, as it may have been in 1933, still, it's very entertaining, loaded with laughs and chuckles. Bennett is superb. She is so much fun to watch as she gets herself into trouble and then, against the odds, gets herself out. Drawing-room comedy suits her and is the direction she should have continued to travel. Bennett would have been wonderful as Amanda in Coward's "Private Lives", but MGM's Thalberg owned the rights, and in 1931, while Bennett was playing suffering womanhood, Shearer played Amanda.Gilbert Roland was cast as the gold digger and did very well in a role that others, including Bennett's frequent costar, Joel McCrea, would have found impossible to play. The Duchesse demonstrates that furs and a little tricorn hat produce the illusion of beauty, if not youth.Ernest, necessary to the plot, makes a surprise appearance at the end of the film, in a scene exactly as Maugham wrote it. However, while Maugham's stage directions describe Ernest as "overwhelmingly gentlemanly . . . speaks in mincing tones" it does not say that his face was a smear of eye shadow and lipstick. What possessed Cukor anyway? Ernest is a likable character and doesn't need garish makeup to deliver the very funny lines Maugham wrote for him.The opening 2 scenes with husband George were not in the play. Apparently they were added to provide motivation as to why Pearl is the way she is and to make Pearl/Bennett sympathetic to audiences. Was this ruse successful? Variety's reviewer wrote, "Miss Bennett goes wicked early and stays that way to the finish. That she shows no sign of repenting or changing her ways will be difficult to justify with many of her best customers." Bennett's box-office popularity was slipping away. She had to escape the baby formula that made her a Star and change her image in order to attract new fans without losing her old fans. This was a difficult problem which Our Betters did not solve.This film will not get boring with repeat viewings. In spite of its imperfections, I intend to watch it repeatedly. After 82 years, the comedy and Bennett are still bright. Therefore, it rates a 10.

Pearl is a rich American who is marrying into British royalty. However, on her wedding night, she learns that her husband has no interest in her--just her money. And, he has a lover. So, instead of leaving him and asking for an annulment, she decides to dive into the decadent lifestyle of these idlers. She flaunts morality and lives for fun and her own sexual conquests. All in all, her friends are a very vacuous crowd.At first, I thought all this was quite interesting and a nice commentary about the British aristocracy. However, after a while it all began to drag because the film was so very talky and mannered. Too many people talking as if they are in an amateur acting class on 'let's do British accent day'. All in all, it became a bore and lost me. One of the worst of these silly performances was by Duchess Minnie (Violet Kemble Cooper)--and it often lacked realism. Of course, this could also be said about several others in this dull film. Yes, it has its moments--but not nearly enough to make it worth seeing--even the chance to see Ernest near the end of the film!By the way, about a decade after this film, Bennett and Gilbert Roland (who was also in this film) were married. They made two films together--both in 1933--"Our Betters" and "After Tonight".

This movie haunts me in a way and fills me with questions. Why did Selznick make this screen version of a 1917 Maugham play right in the middle of the Great Depression in America? I wonder what was on his mind -- to make people angry enough to bring their friends for another look? To let them scoff at the foibles of the impossibly idle rich? This movie primarily is about American expats who've found a place among a jaded British aristocracy (which, at the time of Maugham's stage play, were, with the rest of England, at the height of a bloody world war that would cost Britain almost an entire generation of its young men). But this film version was brought to the screen in 1933, at the height of a crushing Depression that left so many millions jobless and homeless and lucky to have the price of a night at the movies. Contrast that with the sly comic turnings of a very young Gilbert Roland as the Chilean idler Pepi, whose pouty side-glances as he manipulates his very rich and titled benefactress were elegantly applied and flawlessly aimed, no doubt, at enraging most any Depression-oppressed American of the day. I'm sure Roland (no idler himself) and Cukor had a lot of fun filming Pepi. I loved the steady Grant Mitchell, elegantly playing a happy snob who unashamedly admits that he'd come to England from Ohio, and has "lost any trace of an American accent." No apologies from his character, who lends the picture a decorum and good-humored tolerance, all in the cause of maintaining these high-blown dodgy "friendships," deftly working to keep things on a happy note, despite bothersome indiscretions. Others have written here of the remarkable performance of Violet Kemble Cooper as the Duchess, and I heartily agree. And what a happy surprise was the very late entrance in the picture of Tyrell Davis (one of the famous tailors from Wellman's "The Public Enemy" two years earlier) as the unabashedly delightful pouffe Ernest, brought in by Bennett's character to salvage a nearly wrecked country weekend. Ernest was summoned hastily from a busy Sunday schedule in London, still attired in his city-best, flawlessly coiffed, with dark heart-shaped lip rouge, more eye shadow than Bennett, and powdered like a pastry. He carried his look as proudly, happily and effortlessly as did the elegant Bennett in her timelessly smashing Hattie Carnegie gowns. Across the Channel, he'd have been exterminated by the Nazis, but in his place among a protective British aristocracy, Ernest was obviously a most happy man, allowed to act out himself completely and taking his place as a favorite among the ladies. I'm astonished that Davis, whose Ernest hilariously capped the picture and who uttered its naughty closing line, was not credited for this fresh and pleasing (or shocking) performance. Have you ever seen such a face in the movies? Or anywhere else? Such a happy individualist in a society that outlawed some of his assumed after-hours behavior. Without the protection of the aristocracy, Ernest, like Wilde, likely would have spent part of his life in prison. This picture contains some dated stage business and moves a bit too slowly for us today, but I'm so happy that it survives. I still wonder, though, what was the aim of making this movie at this time in the American experience? Hughes and Selznick wanted and expected an audience and a profit, after all. Was a Maugham play burning a hole in their pockets? Were generous eyes-full of Constance Bennett in clingy satin gowns enough to draw 'em in? I suspect there was a social aim here, but I'm not sure what it is.

Must confess I scored it a Ten to raise the average. By all rights this one should rate an average of 8-9.The bad prints and dated stage business cannot diminish the ethereal beauty of Constance Bennett and Anita Louise, the biting satire of Somerset Maugham, and an over-the-top pas de deux finalé between a lecherous duchess and a "dancing queen" that embellishes one of the most comically smashing dénouements in film history.