Starring: Fredric March, Sylvia Sidney, Adrianne Allen, Richard Gallagher, George Irving, Esther Howard

Hosted by Caroline Golum and Cristina Cacioppo

Jerry (Fredric March) may be an alcoholic wannabe playwright, but he’s got charm enough to win over heiress Joan (Sylvia Sydney). After the two marry, she finds his romantic entanglements are far from over, but rather than call it quits, she proposes a “modern marriage” so that she can get hers too.

Rather than presenting marriage as a tidy moral institution, Merrily We Go to Hell embraces jealousy, adultery, drinking, sexual freedom and unconventional arrangements with candor, refusing to punish or resolve its characters’ transgressions. Dorothy Arzner, one of the few women directing major studio films at the time, and a pioneer of the still-young art form to boot, brings an especially sharp perspective to the story, balancing melodrama with wit and a strikingly modern sense of female agency.