Merrily We Go to Hell (1932): a devil of a time with a future star (Review)

It was a truism, once, that Hollywood portrayals of alcoholism were glib, comic affairs until Billy Wilder made The Long Weekend. While nothing can take away the quality of Wilder’s film, one of the pleasures of living at this particular moment in history – yes, there are some – is seeing all those old truisms get reassessed. Suddenly, we’re aware that the version of film history we learned is full of elisions and evasions, and labels like Criterion and the BFI are supplying us with the missing pieces. Criterion’s latest UK Blu-Ray is Merrily We Go to Hell, a film by Dorothy Arzner which feels disarmingly like the missing link between the comic boozing of W.C. Fields and Wilder’s searing take on the same subject.

Arzner’s film begins in screwball mode, with Fredric March’s shakily employed writer Jerry drunk from the first scene, firing off mush-mouthed quips to Sylvia Sidney’s Joan. Edwin Justus Mayer’s script has plenty of terrific lines – Jerry’s boast that he’s “one of the few drinking newspapermen who can hold his job” goes by so quickly it takes you a second to spot the malapropism. It’s easy to see why Joan endangers her status as heiress to a fortune by marrying him. For a while, it looks as if Merrily We Go to _____ (as some of the more prudish publications called it on its initial release) is going to offer a classic romantic comedy set-up with the genders switched: the chaotic, life-loving man who melts the heart of the uptight, overcautious woman.

If that’s all Arzner was doing, it would still be interesting coming from her. A former ambulance driver during World War I, she was as far out of the closet as it was possible to be in the 1930s. She was trusted by the studios, with Sam Goldwyn giving her one of his cherished projects – making Anna Sten a star – in 1934’s Nana. In the two years that separate Merrily We Go to Hell from Nana, though, Hollywood had changed. The Hays Code had been brought in, and while the stated duty of the Hays Office was to regulate on-screen content, it was also responding to a public outcry over the “immoral” lifestyles of Hollywood insiders.

If Arzner knew she was in the firing line, she didn’t flinch. The sex worker heroines of Nana and Dance, Girl, Dance (the latter also available on Criterion UK) do not seem to be responding to any public fit of morality, and neither do Joan and Jerry. Cannily, Merrily We Go to Hell uses the public’s expectation that drunkenness will be dealt with flippantly to smuggle greater transgressions into its plot. An early, seemingly frivolous POV shot where a drunken Jerry sees Joan as an indistinct blur becomes his excuse for having an affair, as he fails to realise a former girlfriend is not, in fact, his wife. Arzner had previously worked with Gregg Toland, the groundbreaking cinematographer of Citizen Kane, and she carries his visual precision through to Merrily We Go to Hell‘s immensely appealing pans and push-ins. It’s a much looser visual grammar than you’d expect from a film made this early on in the sound era.

Responding to her husband’s infidelity, Joan decides they’re going to have a “modern marriage”, which puts you in mind of the film Fredric March made a year later, Design for Living. That film – essentially polyamorous screwball – is still strikingly progressive today, but Joan’s actions then point to a different part of Hollywood’s future. Her affair partner is none other than Cary Grant, reminding you that while she couldn’t make Anna Sten into the new Dietrich, Arzner had an eye for upcoming talent – her previous collaboration with March, 1931’s Honor Among Lovers, featured a young Ginger Rogers. Even Grant, and a very strong performance from Sidney, can’t steal the film from March. Aside from anything else, it’s an unexpectedly good companion piece to his memorably dangerous take on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The melodrama of the closing act lands rather too heavily on Sidney’s shoulders, an overly moralistic approach that suggests the Hays Office would have enjoyed at least one part of Arzner’s film. Still, there’s plenty here that startles – not least the moment when you realise this movie, with its Withnail & I levels of alcohol consumption, was made one year before Prohibition ended…

Two very strong special features help fill in this context. The first is film historian Cari Beauchamp’s 26-minute video essay, which looks at the lives of Sidney, March and Arzner and is particularly magnetic when discussing the latter. Arzner wasn’t just a director, she was a hot-shot editor and screenwriter, and her partner Marion Morgan was an acclaimed choreographer – had they lived a little later, they’d have made a formidable independent production house with that range of talents. Even more satisfying is Dorothy Arzner: Longing for Women, a documentary by the German director Katja Raganelli. This examines Arzner’s career through the lens of the remote desert home she moved into with Morgan after her Hollywood career ended. The rather homoerotic title is a play on Arzner’s now-lost directorial debut Fashions for Women, which turns out to be indicative of Raganelli’s approach; Arzner’s life is a window into her work, rather than the other way round.

Raganelli specialised in documentaries about trailblazing female directors – Agnès Varda, Lotte Reiniger and Alice Guy-Blaché are among her other subjects – and the respect she has for Arzner is palpable in her film’s interviews and narration (read by Stroszek‘s Eva Mattes). She was active from 1977 to 1999, a span of time when it must have felt like few others were championing the work of women in film history. Happily, as this disc proves, it’s less of a lonely job these days.

The Nightingales’ drummer, joins us to talk about all manner of things including working with Cumming and Lee, her formative musical influences, the things that have got her through lockdown, the thrill of getting back on the road to tour the Four Against Fate album, and which stand-up comedian Graham sounds most like.

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