Merrily We Go to Hell

Part voguish 'sophisticated' satire, part domestic melodrama, this film from the Lubitsch era at Paramount is a curious but highly entertaining hybrid. March, a journalist and would-be playwright with a heartbreak in his past and a liking for the bottle, woos and weds Sylvia Sidney's heiress, and we follow their 'matrimony modern style' through better and worse, richer and poorer, sickness and health, up to a dubiously happy ending of which Sirk would have been proud. As befits a film by Hollywood's foremost female 'auteur', all the male characters are hopelessly immature; yet the women rarely transcend movie types.