Cathardincu Surprisingly incoherent and boring

SpuffyWeb Sadly Over-hyped

Winifred The movie is made so realistic it has a lot of that WoW feeling at the right moments and never tooo over the top. the suspense is done so well and the emotion is felt. Very well put together with the music and all.

Rexanne It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

Charles Herold (cherold) Divorce of Lady X is a screwball comedy that captures the basic screwball formula but fails to be actually funny.Olivier plays the staid guy while Oberon plays the wacky dame who disrupts his life. This leads to mistaken identities and general chaos.It's a formula that worked great in Bringing Up Baby, but fails here. There are a number of reasons. The direction is static, often revealing its origins as a stage play. Olivier is stiff, and Oberon tries to hard in what was to become known many years later as the manic pixie role.While many screwball comedies take their time getting their stars from hate to love, Lady X jumps the gun. This is particularly problematic because Oberon's character is genuinely awful, manipulative and self centered, and she never achieves the charming playfulness necessary to make that seem cute. Meanwhile, Olivier is a bitter misogynist. And yes, terrible people can fall in love, but it's still not convincing here.The mistaken identity part is a good idea but is completely unpersuasive, requiring Olivier to be dumb as a box and Oberon to reach an almost sociopathic level of scheming.Screwball comedies rely on charm and chemistry, as in Bringing Up Baby or It Happened One Night. Here the leads have iffy chemistry (they did better later on with Wuthering Heights) and not a whole lot of charm (at least by American standards; perhaps charm just isn't a British thing?).Yes, it's got big stars, but it's an old creaky movie that simply isn't all that good.

blanche-2 Laurence Olivier, Merle Oberon, Ralph Richardson, and Binnie Barnes star in "The Divorce of Lady X," a 1938 comedy based on a play. Olivier plays a young barrister, Everard Logan who allows Oberon to spend the night in his hotel room, when the London fog is too dense for guests at a costume ball to go home. The next day, a friend of his, Lord Mere (Richardson), announces that his wife (Barnes) spent the night with another man at the same hotel, and he wants to divorce her. Believing the woman to be Oberon, Olivier panics. Oberon, who is single and the granddaughter of a judge, pretends that she's the lady in question, Lady Mere, when she's really Leslie Steele.We've seen this plot or variations thereof dozens of time. With this cast, it's delightful. I mean, Richardson and Olivier? Olivier and Oberon, that great team in Wuthering Heights? Pretty special. Olivier is devastatingly handsome and does a great job with the comedy as he portrays the uptight, nervous barrister. Oberon gives her role the right light touch. She looks extremely young here, fuller in the face, with Jean Harlow eyebrows and a very different hairdo for her. She wears some beautiful street clothes, though her first gown looks like a birthday cake, and in one gown she tries on, with that hair-do, she's ready to play Snow White. Binnie Barnes is delightful as the real Lady Mere.The color in this is a mess, and as others have mentioned, it could really use a restoration. Definitely worth seeing.

Gordon Cheatham (cheathamg) At one point in the film, Olivier is cross examining a woman accused of adultery during a divorce trial. She is acting coy and Olivier goes off into a rant against all women. Below is a quote of his words."Woman has a religion of her own, the ancient creed of womanhood. There is only one article of faith, but every woman sincerely and steadfastly believes in it, and that is she is the unique and perfect achievement of the human species, being especially evolved to be above criticism, beyond reproach and outside the law. Man in his folly and kindness has been bamboozled into accepting woman as a rational being and has granted her emancipation on that assumption. What is his reward? Modern woman has disowned womanhood and refuses man's obligations. She demands freedom but won't accept responsibility. She insists upon time to develop her personality and she spends it on cogitating on which part of her body to paint next. By independence, she means idleness. By equality, she means carrying on like Catherine the Great. By companionship with man, she means that he should wait upon her hand and foot. Modern woman has no loyalty, decency or justice; no endurance, reticence or self-control; no affection, fine-feelings or mercy. In short, she is unprincipled, relentless and exacting; idle, unproductive and tedious; unimaginative, humorless and vain; vindictive, undignified and weak, and the sooner man takes out his whip again, the better for sanity and progress."

marxi Spoilers Ahead Weak and tiresome story of wealthy woman and a conceited barrister who meet because she needs a room on a foggy night. The woman deceives the barrister telling him she is married when she is not and she thinks she is quite clever. She enlists acquaintances to help her with this gag and of course they all find this nonsense hilarious. Too bad the audience won't! Then, as you might have suspected, the barrister and the woman fall madly in love.Even Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon with their high brow acting techniques can't bring any life to this muddled and insipid film. 70/100.