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Tuesday, April 28, 2020

A Bill of Divorcement (1932)

An American drama directed by George Cukor, starring John Barrymore, Billie Burke and Katharine Hepburn.
A man is released from a mental institution to find that his wife has divorced him and is marrying another man. His daughter calls off her engagement to take care of her father because there is insanity "in her blood".
Boring, trite, simplistic, dated, generally not good. The simple plot had nothing to hold my attention and the shallow characters could not do so either. This was filmed in RCA Photophone, an early system of adding sound to films. It sounded terrible, but looked alright. I noticed good exposure, contrast and detail until the camera panned. During a pan, everything got all glitchy and choppy. I'm including an accurate image from the version I watched so you can see the detail. Check out the crisp highlights on the chairs and the man's hair in the center. The daughter abandoning her engagement because of her father's insanity goes along with the eugenics policies of the time. It was considered bad for people with even family histories of mental or physical illness to reproduce. Some were even given forced sterilization. Hitler picked up this idea AFTER America, but also after ancient Greece and most of Europe. I really had trouble watching this film, so I rate it bad. You should probably avoid it.

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