User Reviews

"Kept Husbands" from 1931 predates the emergence of the Catholic Legion of Decency and its strangulating code of social correctness. Still, it's hard to imagine the censors would have had much trouble with this morality play of virtue tempted and temptation rejected.

A very young Joel McCrea is Dick, a former collegiate football hero now working as a "steel boss" for the Parker Steel Company. Having saved several workers from death, he's invited by the company's president, Arthur Parker, to dinner at a mansion replete with fawning servants and a guest list that reflects the idle rich class that Parker's daughter, Dot, worships.

Fear that Dick wouldn't know how to use dinner utensils fades as his sports past is revealed. Dot resolves to get him to propose within four weeks and her dad shakes hands with her, sealing both her resolve and his grudging acquiescence to his beloved daughter's whim.

Actually Dot proposes to Dick, he accepts and he's then co-opted into her world of aimless affluence, expensive purchases and vapid friends. And globetrotting with dad's seagoing yacht as transport.

Dick is, later rather than sooner, a man of steel and he rebels. Dot skirts with but clearly doesn't succumb to the seductive and booze-driven blandishments of an old friend, a moth-eaten roue in a tux. That's important: other films of the time frankly show or strongly imply adultery but at the starting gate Dot bolts from the race and runs back to a suspicious and now rejecting hubby.

As with many films from a much earlier Hollywood, there is an angelic mom, here Dick's, and she gives the now conscience-stricken Dot some sage advice: "All husbands are kept." Go forth, she gently intones, and redeem your marriage.

Guess the ending.

"Kept Husbands" is a period piece. But aren't there still marriages based on one spouse's financial dominance over the other? Joel McCrea is a young and convincing fellow determined to make his way in the world without unearned advantages. And little known today Dorothy Mackaill is very effective as an empty pleasure seeker who awakens to the hope of a deeper future based on love than her fur and jewel bedecked younger life has given her.

The film's class issues seem comical and are familiar to us today. I wonder how Depression-era moviegoers reacted to the display of unearned conspicuous consumption.

If early Hollywood social attitudes interest you, see this film (available now on DVD).

7/10.

A dinner party with a wealthy family leads steel plant supervisor Joel McCrea into the arms of socialite Dorothy Mackaill, a spoiled young lady who at first dismisses him for being of "working class" but is obviously sexually attracted to him. Even her society friends begin to accept him when they discover he's a big college football hero who once lead his team to a big victory that has become legendary. While Mackaill's father (Robert McWade) likes McCrea very much, her snooty mother (Florence Roberts) is against their attraction and appears to have a breakdown every time Mackaill mentions him. McCrea, for his part, instantly notices one of her society friends (Clara Kimball Young) verbally abusing her husband (Freeman Wood) who came from the working class too, and when Mackaill's affections begin to distract him from work, he fears he too might become a "kept husband".

As their marriage seems to be a happy occasion with McCrea's loving mother (Mary Carr) taking an instant liking to his new daughter-in-law but McCrea's cynical friend (sour-pussed Ned Sparks) not so sure, Mackaill's real personality comes out. Having agreed prior to marriage to living off of his salary, she can't help but take him on an extended honeymoon in Europe (with McWade's money of course) and buying furs which McCrea can't afford. Returning to the states makes her motivations all the more clear when she takes up with her old society cronies, including the lecherous Bryant Washburn whom she's known all her life. She even goes as far as to try and block his taking a business trip her own father arranged, and this leads to McCrea questioning his own masculinity, leading to McWade stepping up to wake his daughter up and make her realize her selfishness is destroying her one chance for happiness.

Mackaill pulls out all the stops in showing her character's personality from her spoiled selfishness to her vulnerability and need for love from a real man to her manipulation which makes her potentially as vile as pal Kimball-Young. At times, you want McCrea to smack her, but then with Carr offering warm motherly advice, it seems other roots are necessary in order to keep this marriage intact and for Mackaill to see her husband as something other than the brawny sexpot he is and not turn him into the dog-walking husband that Wood has turned out to be. There's a very funny drunken sequence between Washburn and Mackaill (referencing "The Villain Still Pursued Her") where they play a chasing game that ultimately wakes Mackaill up to what she really wants. In the end, this isn't about the man being the breadwinner and the wife being the homebody, but ultimately, about each of them accepting the values of what brought them together in the first place and putting the other partner in their thoughts before themselves.

****SPOILERS*** Despite his background as a Yale graduate and it's star football running back modest and unassuming Dick Bruton, Joel McCrea, is just a working man at heart and nothing else. You can just imagine when his boss Arthur Parker's, Robert McWade, daughter Dottie, Dorothy Mackaill, took a shine to him when he was invited to dinner at the Parker Estate. Not only was he tall and good looking but not at all interested in fame and in getting a $1,0000.00 bonus for saving three fellow steel workers lives in a accident at her dad's steel mill. This impressed Dottie so much that she set her sights in getting Dick hooked and married before Christmas just about month away.

Even though Dick was anything but impressed with Doddie and her rich and never worked a day in their lives friends he did find her attractive in a nutty kind of way and before you know it he accepted, which should have been the other way around, Dottie's proposal of marriage. As Dick was soon to find out if he didn't already marriage to a rich and full of herself girl wasn't exactly paradise. Getting a promotion at the steel mill made life a little better for Dick in him being into his work, as the mill's 3rd vice president, and staying away from his wife Dottie and her rich and snobbish friends. But things soon came to a head when Dick got the job of being in charge of the construction of a major bridge project in St. Louis which called for him to be away from home, New Jersey, for two weeks. It's those two weeks that Dottie has a number of major parties and social functions to attend! And it's now either building the bridge or staying home with his wife Dottie if he want her to stay married to him.

*****SPOILER***** All American Joel McCrae as Dick Brunton was never better as the guy who's not impressed with money or position but just wants to do a good days work for a good days or weeks pay which was back then in 1930 $45.00 a week; That's about $625,00 a week in 2013 dollars. As for his wife Dottie she realized that her money and good looks weren't enough to attract a man like Dick who was interested in far more important things in the woman that he married. Like her raising a family and washing the dishes as well as his socks and pants and having food, or a hot meal, on the table when he comes home from a hard days work. Now with Dottie finally seeing the light in what a happy marriage is supposed to be the two newlyweds drive into the sunset in Dick's battered jalopy to live a normal, not filthy rich, life and make ends meet with Dick's $45.00, pulse a 10% raise, a week salary. That in the depths, which in 1930 or 1931 were still yet to come, of the Great 1930's Depression that may very well, with all the thousands of steel mills being forced to close down, put Dick on the unemployment line!

P.S Check out the tenant at the Burton House Hughie "Smily" Hanready played by Ned Sparks. Spark's dead pan and unemotional way of delivering his lines was so important to him that he had himself insured for $10,000.00 if anyone was able to photograph him smiling.

As others have noted, though this is marketed at "Pre-Code" there is little here to suggest that the censors would have had an issue. A spoiled, rich girl sets her sights on a boy from the wrong side of the tracks, and does whatever it takes to get him. And get him she does, but he eventually rebels and she finds she can't keep him with her money any longer, and must find another way.

I had hoped the ending would give the film more of a pre-code kick, but unfortunately it wasn't there. I found the first two-thirds or more of the film stronger than the last third. In that first section, Dorothy Mackaill as the rich girl, Joel McCrea as the boy, and Robert McWade as the girl's father were the outstanding performances. They had depth and ease in their characters. Most of the others were flatly written -- Mary Carr as the boy's mom was sugary sweet, Ned Sparks as the Carr's border was there for comic relief, and a pack of shrewish women led by Florence Roberts as the girl's mother were all painfully overplayed for me. "Just get them off the screen!" I kept thinking.

But as I said, even the strong performances didn't sustain themselves throughout the film, with the one exception of McWade as the girl's father. His character remained his believable self throughout the film, and though he participated in spoiling his daughter, you always felt he did so because he truly loved his daughter, rather than trying to win her affection through money. At the last, you truly felt that even without all his riches as the owner of a steel mill, he could walk away and there would still be something of the man left at the end. There was still something more to the man outside of what we saw in this film. The other characters never achieved that feeling.

This is a film I'm glad I saw, but one which I would not say I had to have in my collection.

"Kept Husbands" is a futile attempt to make a 75-minute movie about nothing. Joel McCrea's character faces a real tragedy - his beautiful wife, Dorothy Mackaill, is also very rich, while he comes from the working class. The horror!! The actors are good, but the film is remarkably trivial and empty - it lacks dramatic interest. *1/2 out of 4.

Dot Parker (Dorothy Mackaill) is all set to find a few laughs when her father invites steel mill foreman Dick Brunton (Joel McCrea) over for dinner to thank him for his heroic actions: instead she is captivated, especially when she realises he is hiding his real persona - Dick Brunton, All American, under a bushel. During dinner a couple pop in on their way to the Opera, it is Mrs. Henrietta Post (Clara Kimball Young), her husband and her real pride and joy - her little Pekinese. Their visit is the talk of the drawing room, her husband, once a promising architect, is now a "kept husband" commanding less respect than the pampered peke!!! Dot then admits to her dad that she is determined to marry Dick (even though they have only exchanged a few words at dinner) and before the year's end she does!! Father fears Dick will lose his integrity - and it almost happens!!

British born Dorothy Mackaill, originally a Follies showgirl and with a reasonable silent film career, had scored a success with "The Office Wife" in 1930 when her studio thought she was through. It got her a new contract and kept her career afloat for a couple of years more but even though "Kept Husbands" had superior production values and a sensitive director in Lloyd Bacon, her role was completely unsympathetic. What was worse her Dot never convinced that there was a nice, genuine girl underneath all the brittleness - which made Joel McCrea's job even easier, he didn't have to do much acting to be the good guy.

At the office Dick is Mr. Parker's shining star and is seen as an up and coming worker but when Dot marries him she sees nothing wrong with spending daddy's money on expensive furs and holidays and keeping Dick in a mad whirl of parties and extravagant living, mingling with her free loading friends. He suddenly finds his lost manhood when Parker gives him the chance of a lifetime to show his loyalty to the firm.

Best in the show definitely is Ned Sparks - how could he not be?? Very strange to see him out of a city slicker suit and into factory overalls but I always thought he could make the telephone book sound hilarious. Here he is Mrs. Brunton's (Mary Carr) acerbic boarder and his homilies and proverbs ("beggars can't be choosers", "a rolling stone gathers no moss" etc) recited in Spark's dead pan delivery proves the hit of the movie!!