Blu-ray Review: Dorothy Arzner’s Merrily We Go to Hell on the Criterion Collection

Arzner’s film is a healthily skeptical, if nowhere near jaundiced, take on the prospects of modern love in the era of Prohibition.

Merrily We Go to HellDirected by Dorothy Arzner, the only female director in Hollywood during the 1930s, Merrily We Go to Hell is an insistently skeptical Prohibition-era anti-romance recounting the seemingly doomed nuptials between dandyish drunkard and newspaper reporter Jerry Corbett (Fredric March) and blithely optimistic Joan Prentice (Sylvia Sidney), the only child of a wealthy manufacturing tycoon. A specific setup to be sure, but Arzner mines the material (based on Cleo Lucas’s 1931 novel I, Jerry, Take Thee, Joan) for the more universal hard truths it has to offer.

When Joan first catches glimpse of Jerry, he’s recusing himself from another boozy bacchanal, hiding from the revelers and getting quietly tipsy on vermouth. She’s just escaped the drunken clutches of a mealy-mouthed suitor and finds in Jerry a sophisticated and urbane alternative. She also recognizes his name from the bylines of her favorite news stories, just as he recognizes her from the neon-lit billboards for cat food around town. An experienced tippler, he manages to fully bewitch the teetotaler even while constantly topping off his tumbler and singing inane ditties about cake, gingerbread, and crème de menthe. Even after he forgets who she is at the end of their extended stolen moment, she’s all but made up her mind that he’s the one for her. And no sooner can a snooping gossip columnist write a story about their chemistry than Jerry and Joan send themselves hurtling toward the altar, despite serious misgivings from Joan’s father (George Irving).

Aside from the potentially crushing weight of all those societal ills careening about—alcoholism foremost, but also the distribution of wealth, perched patriarchy, and the constraints of monogamy—Merrily We Go to Hell is actually a surprisingly lithe drama, with both leads pulling bursts of energy from their back pockets just as the scenario’s moralizing threatens to bring the whole thing to collapse. When, having spent the bulk of their honeymoon phase attempting to write a play, Jerry comes to the realization that his talent might fall short of his ambition, Joan (playing dutiful housewife despite her caviar upbringing) presents him with a three-star chicken dinner on a platter, which he accidentally sends tumbling onto the creaking floor of their flat. Rather than despair, Joan laughs and sends him to the store to collect some canned chicken. Sidney’s vivacity goes a long way toward selling this otherwise hoary outcome, just as it does later in the film when Jerry’s alcoholism finds him entertaining the thought of returning to the arms of an old flame (Adrianne Allen).

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Similarly, March’s knack for harnessing the impish spark of charm that fuels life’s most successful alcoholics helps explain Joan’s seemingly bottomless well of forgiveness, when it’s all too clear she ought to remove stakes and high-tail it back to daddy’s manse with Charlie Baxer (Cary Grant) on her arm. Merrily We Go to Hell was March’s fourth time being directed by Arzner, who had a hand in molding his on-screen persona. And what the Edwin Justus Mayer screenplay doesn’t give him and Sidney, Arzner coaxes out of them anyway, not exactly taking sides in their battles but, instead, recognizing just how impossible it often is for two people to come together. But when she does tip her allegiances—as when Joan dismayingly discovers the ring Jerry has placed on her finger when exchanging his vows is, in fact, the end of a corkscrew—she does so from an unmistakably feminist angle.

Image/Sound

Merrily We Go to Hell is the rare early sound picture that almost sounds better today than it looks. That’s in part because Criterion’s restoration, while top-notch and full of rich textures, is regrettably marred, if only for a few minutes at the film’s halfway mark, by what appears to be an attempt to correct some degradation in the print. The net result of the tinkering finds the lower portion of the frame stuttering. That aside, the film looks fantastic for a nearly 90-year-old property, and also contrary to the era, the sound is surprisingly naturalistic beyond the sparse music cues. Merrily, your ears won’t go to hell.

Extras

As with Criterion’s earlier release for Dance, Girl, Dance, the bonus features on Merrily We Go to Hell stress the relatively lack of critical literature on Dorothy Arzner; neither disc is up to the distributor’s standard for fully-loaded special editions, both only featuring a couple extras each. In that sense, it’s almost too perfect that one of the two included here is a vintage documentary, 1983’s Dorothy Arzner: Longing for Women, that finds its makers too late to capture their subject on camera as she passed away just before they entered production. It’s still a nice overview, and film historian Cari Beauchamp’s half-hour look at Arzner’s career and this film’s place within it gets the job done alongside the included essay from film scholar Judith Mayne. Arzner herself seemed a comparatively unassuming figure among classic Hollywood directors, but one still wishes for a little more cake and gingerbread.

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Overall

A spry little thing with one of the truly titanic titles of the early sound years, Dorothy Arzner’s Merrily We Go to Hell is a healthily skeptical, if nowhere near jaundiced, take on the prospects of modern love in the era of Prohibition.

Score: 
 Cast: Sylvia Sidney, Fredric March, Adrianne Allen, Skeets Gallagher, George Irving, Esther Howard, Florence Britton, Charles Coleman, Cary Grant, Kent Taylor  Director: Dorothy Arzner  Screenwriter: Edwin Justus Mayer  Distributor: The Criterion Collection  Running Time: 83 min  Rating: NR  Year: 1932  Release Date: May 11, 2021  Buy: Video

Eric Henderson

Eric Henderson is the web content manager for WCCO-TV. His writing has also appeared in City Pages.

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