Written by Donald Ogden Stewart from Walter Reisch’s adaptation of the play Divorçons by Victorien Sardou and Emile de Najac
Cinematography by George Barnes
Editing by William Shea
Original music by Werner R. Heymann
Cast: Merle Oberon, Melvyn Douglas, Burgess Meredith
USA, 1941, United Artists, digital, B&W, 84 min.
Lubitsch’s first (and last) independent production following the success of The Shop Around the Corner gives a luminous Merle Oberon and Melvyn Douglas’ six-year wedded bliss a bad case of hiccups when “individualist” Burgess Meredith (“Phooey!”) triangulates the union. Algonquin Round Table wit Donald Ogden Stewart, who’d won an Oscar for The Philadelphia Story a year earlier, deals the double entendres fast and risqué, and one can imagine David Niven’s description of the director, “beside the camera, perched on a small stepladder, giggling and hugging himself.” Textbook Lubitsch touch: the stationary camera on Meredith’s kiss-and-tell piano.