The Divorce of Lady X (1938)

Director

• Tim Whelan

Starring

• Merle Oberon
• Laurence Olivier
• Binnie Barnes
• Ralph Richardson
• Morton Selten

Last On

03:35-05:05 Thu 8th Jan 2009 90m
Channel 4

Synopsis

Producer Alexander Korda used marvellous early three-strip Technicolor to give this piece of screwball whimsy a special lustre. The film starred his wife-to-be Merle Oberon, who plays a party-goer trapped in a London hotel by one of those fogs so beloved of Americans, and Korda hoped the use of colour would endear the star to US audiences. The Technicolor works, but Oberon doesn't - comedy clearly wasn't her forte, and she fared much better the following year when paired again with Laurence Olivier in Wuthering Heights. Olivier does little more than pout, so the acting honours are stolen by Ralph Richardson and Binnie Barnes, who played the Oberon role in an earlier screen version of the same tale, Counsel's Opinion, in 1933. The film's quite amusing, though, in a daft and inconsequential way. Watch out for a scene in which Olivier gets a message: the teenage actor playing the bellboy grew up to become Lewis Gilbert, one of Britain's most distinguished, and certainly most commercially successful, directors.