My Marriage (1936) User Reviews

High society loved her until the truth came out.

[mark.waltz · 7/10 · 20 June 2022]

A fun programmer about the sudden snobbery that socialite Claire Trevor faces when she discovers that her father was involved in criminal activities which resulted in his murder. Her fiancee Kent Taylor is determined to marry her, but she's completely humiliated by the situation and tries to end it. Taylor's society queen mother (Pauline Frederick), profiled in magazine articles on grand old families, is graceful on the surface (while Trevor's former close friend Helen Wood is obviously horrified and makes no attempt to hide it), but she's secretly plotting against them under the guise of the supportive mother-in-law. It's going to take a lot of struggling for Trevor and Taylor to make it!

Great to see the future Oscar winning actress in an early lead, having been a rising ingenue for several years. But she's just one of many Hollywood blondes, so it would take films like "Dead End", "Stagecoach", "Murder My Sweet" and of course "Key Largo" to make her an immortal femme fatale. Frederick, who played trouble making mothers in several 30's women's potboilers, is delightfully sneaky in her deviousness, showing the audience her displeasure with a sneer behind Trevor's back.

Taylor and his on-screen brother (Thomas Beck) are too weak to get out from their mother's thumb although Beck does warn Trevor not to trust darling mama. Wood is an effective snob, and the always good Paul Kelly memorable as the old friend of Trevor's father who stands by her. Great character actors Beryl Mercer and Henry Kolker add good support. Great art direction and a gripping pace, under the direction of.l George Archainbaud makes this a glamorous second feature, showing that often, the B's could look like an A when done right.

Claire Trevor in 20th Century Fox melodrama

[blanche-2 · 6/10 · 2 January 2022]

After learning that her father was a criminal and not the respectable man he appeared to be, a young woman breaks off her engagement to her fiance.

"My Marriage" from 1936 stars Claire Trevor, Kent Taylor, Pauline Frederick, Paul Kelly, Helen Wood, and Thomas Beck.

Trevor plays Carol Barton, a woman in high society happily engaged to John Dewitt Tyler III. One night the police visit her and take her to her dying father, who had secretly run a gambling empire for years.

Devastated, Carol decides to go on a cruise and get away from everyone. While the ship prepares to set sail, her ex-fiance (Taylor) arrives and insists that she stay and marry him. She does.

Though John's sister is horrified when she learns of the marriage, her mother (Frederick) wants to accept Carol, and in fact invites the newlyweds to live with her for a time. Carol's dream is that they can get their own place, but John isn't having any luck getting a job. Carol does some nosing around and realizes it is her "supportive" mother-in-law out to break them up.

Carol then learns that John's brother was involved in her father's murder.

Claire Trevor was wonderful in these '30s melodramas, very sympathetic - and despite what could be maudlin dialogue coming from anyone else's mouth, it's always fresh and natural coming from her.

Twentieth Century Fox did a lot of these films in the '30s. No matter how dated, with Trevor starring, they were enjoyable.

A Puzzle Wrapped In A Melodrama

[boblipton · 6/10 · 17 February 2023]

Claire Trevor thinks her engagement to Kent Taylor is ended when her husband is killed, and it is revealed the source of his wealth was not the financial institution he headed, but the gambling joints. He was no more than a rich crook, and his daughter unworthy to consort with people whose wealth had passed through several generations since it was stolen. To her surprise, he insists on marrying her immediately. She expects his mother, Pauline Frederick, to snub her. Instead, she is kind. Or so it seems.

I enjoy the variety of roles Miss Trevor played while she was Queen of the Fox B lot in the middle 1930s, before she became an A-lister from a western movie (STAGECOACH) she got to play a great variety of roles and work with very talented people who didn't have quite the recognition to command big budgets. The man in charge of Fox's B production, Sol Wurzel, may have had a reputation for vulgarity as great as Harry Cohn, but his unit turned out well-made, entertaining movies that showed profits. Here, with a cast that includes the underrated Paul Kelly, Beryl Mercer, and Henry Kolker, Miss Trevor does not give her most compelling performance. She is, alas, a little too quietly self-pitying and stalwart to be tremendously interesting. But the movie, as a whole, is solid under the direction of George Archainbaud.

Excellent social melodrama with a strong attack on society's hypocrisy

[robert-temple-1 · 1 November 2011]

This is a very lively film, with an excellent lead performance by the young Claire Trevor (aged 25 or 26), here appearing as a platinum blonde. Claire Trevor was so superb in her many film noir roles in later years, that it is fascinating to see her in something before she became a femme fatale, and was instead a bright young thing with a sweet smile which wasn't forced. The film is aided by a very good script written by Frances Hyland, a woman who wrote 57 films (the last being in 1947) but of whose life we know almost nothing except that she was born 'around 1904' and brought up in Arkansas. No one knows when she died. The director is George Archainbaud (1890-1959), a Paris-born director of 144 films, including so many Hopalong Cassidy movies that one wonders if he later became part horse, or slept with a six-gun. But here, Archainbaud does a highly professional job of directing a powerful contemporary social melodrama, which is so far a cry from the Wild West of his later years. The story is set on Long Island, where Pauline Frederick icily plays the 'Queen of Long Island Society', Mrs. Dewitt Tyler, one of America's archest snobs. She has two sons, the elder of whom (Kent Taylor) is engaged to Claire Trevor. They are all having a party one evening when it is announced on the radio that Trevor's father has been shot and that it has been discovered that all of his riches came from his controlling a gambling empire, a fact which he had kept from his daughter (whose mother has died long before). Suddenly, all the socialites turn on Trevor except for John Tyler, who sticks with her, goes to the hospital with her to see her dying father, where for her sake, and to avoid endangering her prospective marriage, her doting father covers up the fact that her brother-in-law to be, the younger brother Roger Tyler (Thomas Beck) had been present at the shooting, used by some gangsters without his knowledge. Roger is a weak character who has contracted huge gambling debts, but whose mother will not let him have any of her fortune other than a modest allowance, so he cannot pay his debts and is forced into this compromising situation. Unaware of all this involvement (albeit as a passive witness) of his own brother in the murder of his fiancée's father, John Tyler marries Claire Trevor quickly and in quiet, shocking his family and friends, who all now consider her a social disgrace with whom they do not wish to associate. There is a savage scene where he brings her back home to a luncheon with female friends, who all treat her as a pariah and raise their eyebrows (what is left of them after they have been plucked, of course) and turn away from her in contempt. The mother pretends to welcome Trevor, now her daughter-in-law, into her home and be nice to her, but busily schemes behind her back to do everything possible to break up the marriage. When John Tyler wants to get a job, three times she secretly phones his prospective employers and tells them not to hire him, so that he cannot have financial freedom to move out and get an apartment and have privacy, and thus be free of her attempts to smash up his marriage. It is all very savage stuff, High Society at work with its sledgehammers against a living threat to its pretensions. Hyland and Archainbaud do not hold back in their depiction of all the cruelty and hypocrisy. Trevor's only friend is her father's assistant, a former policeman named Barney Dolan, played by Paul Kelly. He is continually trying to solve the murder of her father, and rejoins the police force as a lieutenant. An excellent cameo role in the film (Barney's mother) is played by Beryl Mercer, the charming little woman with the wobbly, loving and motherly voice and manner who appears in so many Hollywood movies of the 1930s, though she died tragically in 1939 aged only 56. Film buffs will remember her from THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES which she made in the last year of her life, as Paul's mother in ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT (1930), and above all in what may be the finest role of her career, as Gary Cooper's adoptive mother in the incredibly sad and moving film SEVEN DAYS' LEAVE (1930, see my review), which is one of the most pathetic and heart-rending tales I have ever seen on film, largely made effective by Beryl Mercer's amazing performance in it, which was truly worthy of an Oscar. Ironically, Paul Kelly who plays Mercer's son in this film died even younger than she did, at only 57, in 1956. Kelly is remembered for many notable films in which he appeared later, such as CROSSFIRE (1947), FEAR IN THE NIGHT (1947, see my review), THE FILE ON THELMA JORDON (1950), and STRANGE JOURNEY (1946). Most of the actors in this film, however, will be familiar to few viewers. As an early vehicle for Claire Trevor, it is not to be missed. It is extraordinary that IMDb has until now had no plot summary or review of this interesting and worthwhile film, so that nothing was known of it apart from the cast and crew list and that its duration was 73 minutes. I am therefore glad to be able at last to contribute some information about it and call attention to it for the benefit of other lovers of old movies and admirers of Claire Trevor.