That was an excellent one.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

The British cinema did not make many colour films in the thirties and forties, and the ones they did make often seemed ill-chosen. At least the Americans tended to reserve Technicolor for their more spectacular movies. I have never, for example, really understood why David Lean chose to make that dull domestic drama "This Happy Breed" in colour, and "The Divorce of Lady X"- a very early example of British Technicolor- is another which would have worked just as well in black-and-white.Leslie Steele, a young socialite attending a charity ball at a London hotel, has to stay overnight because of a particularly bad "pea-souper" fog. As there are no rooms available, she is forced to share a suite with Everard Logan, a handsome young barrister specialising in divorce cases. Leslie is single, but a misunderstanding makes Logan believe that she is married, and she plays along with this misapprehension. Later Logan is approached by an old school friend, Lord Mere, who asks him to represent him in a divorce suit against his wife whom he suspects of adultery. Logan has never met Lady Mere, who happens to have been another guest at the same party, and a further series of misunderstandings leaves Logan convinced firstly that Lady Mere was the woman who spent the night in his suite and secondly that he himself is the man whom Lord Mere suspects of being his wife's lover. To complicate matters further, he is starting to fall in love with Leslie, even though he believes her to be another man's wife. Despite all these complications, he agrees to take on the case.This was a remake of another film, "Counsel's Opinion", made only five years earlier by the same company, London Films. (Binnie Barnes, who plays Lady Mere here, appeared as Leslie in the earlier film). I have never seen "Counsel's Opinion", but the fact that it was remade so soon afterwards, in the then very expensive medium of Technicolor, suggests that the story was a popular one in the thirties. Today, however, it is difficult to understand why. To start with, it is obvious that the scriptwriters had very little legal knowledge. This becomes clear when Logan, in the middle of cross-examining a witness, suddenly launches into a lengthy tirade against modern women, only dubiously relevant to the subject of his cross-examination, without incurring the immediate severe rebuke from the Judge which would be the reward of any barrister who tried such tactics in real life. As a barrister, Logan would not have been permitted to receive instructions direct from his client rather than via a solicitor. And, most importantly, you don't need to know much about legal etiquette to realise that the idea of a lawyer prosecuting a case in which he himself might be named as a co-respondent is quite absurd.These legal howlers might have been forgivable if the film had been made as a zany farce- there is, after all, something farcical about the idea of a lawyer ending up suing himself through a series of misunderstandings- but in a romantic comedy set in the world of the law they are simply embarrassing. They are not, however, the only reason why the story just does not work today. The best thing about the film is the lovely Merle Oberon. (Her husband, Alexander Korda, acted as producer). Laurence Olivier, however, seems strangely miscast. Now I have never been an adherent of that school of thought which holds that Olivier could not convincingly play any character born after around 1600, but light comedy was never really his forte, and he seems rather stiff as Logan. (His comedic skills did not improve with age, either. In "The Prince and the Showgirl", a film he himself directed some twenty years later, he was to prove even worse than he is here).The main problem, however, is that tastes in humour have changed since 1938. Comedies about divorce and remarriage were very popular in the American cinema around this period, and although the British tended to be more Puritanical about such matters, films like this were not unknown on this side of the Atlantic. Now some of the American comedies of divorce were very good; "The Philadelphia Story", for example, must still rank as one of the best comedies ever made. Others, however, have dated badly; one example which comes to mind is "My Favourite Wife", even though it shared a leading man (Cary Grant) with "The Philadelphia Story". An important part of their original appeal is that they were considered modern, daring and ground-breaking and a way of showing just how modern, daring and ground-breaking the 1930s and 1940s were in comparison to the boring, fuddy-duddy 1910s and 1920s. Any objections from moralists could be overcome by pointing out that many of them end with the feuding couple still together or remarried. (In "The Divorce of Lady X" Lord and Lady Mere eventually reconcile when he discovers she is innocent of any wrongdoing).More than sixty years on, however, films like this are no longer seen as daring or modern; in fact, the social attitudes they enshrine often seem very outdated. "The Divorce of Lady X" probably never had much going for it beyond the fact that it was trendy by the standards of 1938. That, unfortunately, does not in itself make it worth seeing in 2014. 4/10

"The Divorce of Lady X" is a lovely color film produced by Alexander Korda--a man who had a great history producing films in the UK and US. However, compared to many of Korda's other great films, this one comes up a bit average. It has a great idea but something about it kept it from being a bit better.The film begins in a horrible London fog. It's so foggy that folks can't get home and a hotel is totally booked. The last person to get a room, Everard (Laurence Olivier), is dead tired and miffed when the management asks him to share his suite since there are so many looking for rooms. Despite this, a very pushy and determined woman, Leslie (Merle Oberon), is able to finagle a bed in his room--and here is complications arise. He thinks she's a married woman and the next day, a man comes to hire him (as he's a barrister--that's a lawyer to us Americans) to sue his wife for divorce--and the woman the new client describes sounds EXACTLY like the woman who just spent the night with him! What's he to do? He's initially afraid that he's about to be named a co-respondent but later it's more complicated when he thinks that he's falling in love with this woman--a woman he thinks has been married four times already!I nearly gave the movie a 7, so I did like it. However, sometimes I really thought they made Oberon's character too obnoxious and unlikable. Additionally, why Olivier's character would want to marry her is perplexing considering she's so obnoxious, manipulative AND he thinks she's been married many times already. Add to this a ridiculous courtroom scene at the very end, it just kept me wishing they'd edited or re-written the thing a bit.

Laurence Olivier, Merle Oberon, Ralph Richardson, and Binnie Barnes star in "The Divorce of Lady X," a 1938 comedy based on a play. Olivier plays a young barrister, Everard Logan who allows Oberon to spend the night in his hotel room, when the London fog is too dense for guests at a costume ball to go home. The next day, a friend of his, Lord Mere (Richardson), announces that his wife (Barnes) spent the night with another man at the same hotel, and he wants to divorce her. Believing the woman to be Oberon, Olivier panics. Oberon, who is single and the granddaughter of a judge, pretends that she's the lady in question, Lady Mere, when she's really Leslie Steele.We've seen this plot or variations thereof dozens of time. With this cast, it's delightful. I mean, Richardson and Olivier? Olivier and Oberon, that great team in Wuthering Heights? Pretty special. Olivier is devastatingly handsome and does a great job with the comedy as he portrays the uptight, nervous barrister. Oberon gives her role the right light touch. She looks extremely young here, fuller in the face, with Jean Harlow eyebrows and a very different hairdo for her. She wears some beautiful street clothes, though her first gown looks like a birthday cake, and in one gown she tries on, with that hair-do, she's ready to play Snow White. Binnie Barnes is delightful as the real Lady Mere.The color in this is a mess, and as others have mentioned, it could really use a restoration. Definitely worth seeing.

This short, unique and original screen-play proved no short of brilliant. It has a simple and entertaining plot of charming but mischevious young Leslie (known at first as Lady X) imposing herself on a foggy night on irritable young masoganistic barrister Everard Logan. Logan declares that he is not in the least bit stirred by her charms, however she finally ends up enjoying his bed, pyjamas and breakfast whilst he has the mattress next door. Ofcourse, being the eligible handsome typical thing that he is, he falls in love with her and vows to arrange her divorce for her, (despite the fact she has no husband!) Ralph Richardson as Lord Mere (Leslie's supposed husband) and Binnie Barnes (the REAL Lady Mere)also help to put him in the light at last. Hurt and irritated, Logan throws his affections for Leslie back in her face and leaves. She goes after him, and naturally, they agree to the marriage finally that Logan had always wanted, and Leslie finalises in curing Logan of his haughtily sexist views. Some say Laurence Olivier is out of his depth in this sort of a film, since in no way is this Hamlet or Harry V or any great feat of literature such as Wuthering Heights, and in no way is he a born comedian. But he gives it unmatched gusto and IS HE SARCASTIC!! His scenes with Merle Oberon, who plays the sweet little charmer of a Leslie are delightful. Oberon is adorable and could not have been better as Leslie. It's been said before that Oberon and Olivier had a wonderful chemistry on screen, just as well as Leigh did in fact; however it could be argued so. They were just as contrastingly wonderful in Wuthering Heights, a classic film which I adore.If you're in the mood of a short but sweet comedy, you couldn't ask for better than this. Fantastic!