Funny drunks aren't realistic drunks, and until Billy Wilder created a great part for Ray Milland, alcoholism was rarely treated seriously. Fredric March is a struggling playwright, favorite of the party scene who hasn't hit the big time. He falls in love with wealthy socialite Sylvia Sidney whose domineering father (George Irving) despises March and does everything in his power to dissuade her from marrying him. But they do, success follows for March, and his illness leads to degradation and tragedy. To teach her husband a lesson, in the meantime, Sidney becomes a party girl herself, flaunts her own discretions (with a young Cary Grant, playing one of the actors in the play), hoping he'll leave his current fling (the play's leading lady, Adrienne Allen) and come back to his senses.
These characters are all presented as worthless bon vivants, even the successful theater people, and March's comical sidekick (Richard "Skeets" Gallagher). The title is March's toast every time he takes a drink, and a metaphor for the dead lives that the characters are leading. This leads to a real downer of a story, shocking in its choice of pre-code sins, a party sequence which is almost an orgy in its set-up with sultry music and dialog. Irving's father is truly a nasty character with no motivation other than total control and possessional of his only child for acting as he does. The Paramount pre-code look is lavish, but it is basically "Dante's Inferno" without the end result of that classic poem's destination.
These characters are all presented as worthless bon vivants, even the successful theater people, and March's comical sidekick (Richard "Skeets" Gallagher). The title is March's toast every time he takes a drink, and a metaphor for the dead lives that the characters are leading. This leads to a real downer of a story, shocking in its choice of pre-code sins, a party sequence which is almost an orgy in its set-up with sultry music and dialog. Irving's father is truly a nasty character with no motivation other than total control and possessional of his only child for acting as he does. The Paramount pre-code look is lavish, but it is basically "Dante's Inferno" without the end result of that classic poem's destination.