3/10
Used to going their own way
17 April 2013
American expatriate Gloria Swanson is living it up pretty good and meets up with society playboy Laurence Olivier and the two fall in love as it were and get married. But both are used to high living and going their own way. So a Perfect Understanding is reached whereby they do just that and they vow never to quarrel.

Well that's easier said than done. And Larry heads off to the continent and the Riviera as he always does partying hearty. Gloria prepares home and hearth. Larry however has mantrap Nora Swinburne chasing him and when Gloria hears about she rebounds and right there is good old John Halliday to catch her.

Gloria Swanson as it turned out had a great singing voice and at the closing credits gets to sing a song with the rather ungainly title I Love You So Much I Hate You. Good voice, mediocre song, but she probably had it tacked on to a mediocre film for those who remembered her singing Love Your Magic Spell Is Everywhere from The Trespasser.

As for Olivier, up to now I had only seen one of his films before As You Like It. I'm not as hard as he is on himself when he was widely quoted as saying that William Wyler taught him the art of acting on film and that everything he did before Wuthering Heights was garbage. This second one I saw though would validate what he said.

Quite frankly the lives of these society twits got about as much interest from me in the 21st century as it did when it was shown in Depression UK and USA. Word of mouth made the public stay away in droves. And the public is always right.
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