Cafe Society

Madeleine Carroll's coming out was eight years ago, and society editor Allyn Joslyn tells her she's a back number; she can't do anything that will get her in his column. So she marries Fred MacMurray. They immediately realize what a mistake they've made. She wants to get an immediate divorce, but her grandfather, Claude Gillingwater talks them into remaining married and publicly amiable until the talk dies down and they can get a quiet annulment. MacMurray doesn't like her friends, and she's incensed at his friendship with Shirley Ross.

MacMurray seemed to star in two or three of these "poor boy gets caught up with society woman" every year in the late 1930s for Paramount. He was always paired with one of the company's glamorous ladies -- although occasionally he would be paired with Claudette Colbert in working-girl mode. He seems to have been Paramount's idea of a working-class hunk. Although this looks like a rote entry into that sort of movie, it seems to have been popular enough. He and Miss Carroll would appear in four more movies together, the first six months after this was released.

Some notes of sanity come from Mr. Gillingwater, and Jessie Ralph as Mr. Joslyn's mother. They vanish from the second half, to be replaced by bartender Paul Hurst, who propounds the normative values.