The Mystery of Marriage
The Mystery of Marriage
| 17 September 1931 (USA)
The Mystery of Marriage Trailers

The courtship rituals of animals and plants are compared to those of contemporary society, with educational and frequently humorous results.

Reviews
Dynamixor

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

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GarnettTeenage

The film was still a fun one that will make you laugh and have you leaving the theater feeling like you just stole something valuable and got away with it.

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Voxitype

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

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Lucia Ayala

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

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Igenlode Wordsmith

This educational film (by the director Mary Field, who produced other nature documentaries in a similar wry style) sets out to impart information on the reproductive habits of various creatures to the young mind, thanks to some painstaking time-lapse photography and some close-up film of various animals -- although the more exotic species appear to have been filmed in the Zoo! So far as this goes it is reasonably informative and interesting, and I encountered a few facts about plant strategies for seed dissemination that I hadn't known before. (I did also spot a couple of errors of fact: so far as I'm aware, frogs are not reptiles and alligators are actually very attentive mothers...) However, the novel and memorable twist here is to reverse the usual sex-education trope in which "the birds and the bees" stand proxy for human activity; in this film, animal behaviour is illustrated by using human examples. The result is often very funny, as in the cuts between praying-mantis females and the icy glances of rival Society ladies, or between the male preening himself and the young man stroking his moustache.

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