Watch The Bride Walks Out For Free

That was an excellent one.

If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

Excellent but underrated film

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

While there's a lot of wit in this screenplay about the ups and downs of a marriage almost doomed from the start, there's really little story, and that makes this disappointing in the lists of 1930's screwball comedy. Barbara Stanwyck is a working girl who marries long-time beau Gene Raymond and at his request stops working. He thinks she's making ends meet, but in reality, she's receiving a ton of "overdue" bills and threats from the otherwise friendly Billy Gilbert to remove the rented furniture which finally occurs on New Year's Eve and brings the couple's problems to a head thanks to the interference of a drunken millionaire (Robert Young) who really has no purpose here than to provide some romantic misunderstandings in their marriage.There's a lot of witty dialog between Raymond and Stanwyck's bickering next-door-neighbors, the cranky Ned Sparks and the sarcastic Helen Broderick. They provide most of the film's humor, and the funny thing about their long-married characters who pretend to hate each other is that you know that they'd never be able to live without each other. A very funny drunken scene occurs when Young arrives at Stanwyck's furniture-less apartment and proceeds to get himself, Stanwyck, Broderick and the still present Gilbert totally tanked with Gilbert sneezing the entire time and Broderick insisting "That's one gazuntight you owe me" every time he tries to sneeze but can't.So while there's a lot to like in this sitcom like entry in the golden age of screwball comedy, there's really a lack of story and structure, even though everybody is on the top of their game. Toss in the always amusing Hattie McDaniel to throw in her two cents as a happy-go-lucky cook, and you've got a recipe for cake which unfortunately didn't rise because it was missing the flour.

If you can get passed the far-outdated trappings (newlyweds in separate beds, and a wife who is forced to give up her well-paying job to live on her husband's measly salary), there are some laughs to be had in this charming romantic comedy from RKO. Screenwriters P.J. Wolfson and Philip G. Epstein, working from a story by Howard Emmett Rogers, manage to throw in some funny, sneaky little laugh lines, and the supporting characters add a great deal of bounce, including sidekick Ned Sparks (who talks like a Myna Bird) and Hattie McDaniel(s) as a sassy cook. The bride (Barbara Stanwyck, who never disappoints) does indeed walk out--into the arms of a millionaire!--and the way the plot is resolved is amusing and clever. **1/2 from ****

Although this film was made before the television era, in some ways it resembles an extended episode of a TV sitcom. The main characters are Michael and Carolyn Martin, a young newlywed couple from New York. The plot centres upon the disharmony caused in their marriage by their financial difficulties. Michael is an engineer earning $35 per week. In the Depression era of the thirties this would probably have been regarded by most Americans as a good living wage, but it is not enough to keep Carolyn in the middle-class style to which she has become accustomed. Before her marriage she worked as a model earning $50 per week, but Michael has old-fashioned views about married women working (old-fashioned by today's standards if not those of the thirties) and refuses to let her go out to work. Carolyn, however, is unable to limit her spending (she impulsively buys a dress costing over $40) and soon the couple are in financial difficulties and their furniture is repossessed. An added complication is that Carolyn has a wealthy admirer in the shape of Hugh, the foppish son of a department-store owner. (At least, he is a fop some of the time. His character seems to veer between a drunken playboy and a perfect gentlemen). The film resembles a sitcom in that the humour arises out of the situations in which the characters find themselves rather than from any particularly witty dialogue. As another reviewer has pointed out, the main comic relief is provided by Billy Gilbert as the repo man and Ned Sparks as Michael's colleague Paul, but as Gilbert's party piece seems to be pretending to sneeze (in which he is joined in a duet by Barbara Stanwyck) and Sparks's speciality is talking out of the side of his mouth while holding a cigar firmly clamped between his jaws, I can only think that audiences of the thirties were more easily pleased than those of today would be. The main problem with this film for a modern audience, however, is its outdated social attitudes. The jocular references to wife-beating, for example, do not seem tasteful or funny today. Although the film is fairly sympathetic to Carolyn's desire to work, a woman's job is seen not in terms of a fulfilling career but in terms of a way of providing pocket-money to keep herself in luxuries. There is also a racist joke when Carolyn's maid (about the only role open to black actresses in the thirties) remarks that black men are too idle to support themselves and prefer to live off their wives. The film as a whole seems very dated today. "Halliwell's Film Guide" describes it as "thin" but "pleasing". The first adjective may be apt; the second certainly is not. 4/10

This is kind of a movie version of an I Love Lucy episode - It's the trials & tribulations of a couple, accompanied by their sidekicks, the other married couple. The girls stick together, the guys stick together. Then Robert Young walks in to "help", but things get all mixed up. Clever script. Helen Broderick plays the same sarcastic, older but wiser friend that sticks by the young bride when things get tough that she played so many times (Father takes a bride, Smartest Girl in Town, Top Hat) Robert Young is the dashing interloper that really does want to help out, but just makes things worse. Ned Sparks is a riot, always muttering things under his breath, the poor suffering husband with a cigar hanging out the corner of his mouth. This movie makes light of some of those old fashioned sexist ideas,(domestic violence, man/wife roles) so may offend some, but then it was made for a different time. Seems to be a remake of "Ten Cents a Dance" from 1931, which also starred B. Stanwyck. I have tried to find the video for sale, have not had luck as of yet.