The Matrimonial Bed

This entertaining and racy early talkie(1930) is a farce about a man with amnesia who thinks he is a chic hairdresser. He is hired to do the hair of a wealthy Paris matron, who it turns out is his actual wife who has since remarried, assuming her husband had been killed. The hairdresser's lost memory is easily recovered in an absurd hypnosis and he demands the restoration of his wife from her new husband. The movie has loads of gay jokes as the hairdresser/ husband played by Frank Fay camps up the hairdresser persona to differentiate himself from the personality of the husband.There are lines like- "I may be a hairdresser but that doesn't mean I hold men's hands" And when he asks what manner of person was he as the hairdresser, he is told, "You were gay, a bit dandified" This is the earliest use of the word gay, with its somewhat current meaning, in the movies, that I can recall, predating "Bringing Up Baby"'s famous line("I went gay all of a sudden") by eight years. There is also a farcical moment when the hairdressers new wife(who makes a belated and not too plausible appearance) catches her husband in bed with what she expects is another woman. She snatches off the covers and exposes her husband with a man. She wails,"What kind of house is this?" There are many entertaining moments with Lilyan Tashman as an aggressive family friend who openly lusts for the hairdresser and Beryl Mercer as the cook who worships her former "Master". The ending is less than satisfying but it is all so silly that it doesn't really matter. Frank Fay does well as the effeminate hairdresser but is less convincing as the rejected husband. He also sings, not very well, a pretty tune that the studio must have been plugging. Worth catching.