If I Were Free

In the early days of talking pictures, it wasn't uncommon for Hollywood to obtain the rights to plays that had recently been on the stage since those were a ready-made source of material that a lot of the movie-going public hadn't seen. Also, since the stuff had been designed for the stage, the fact that sound cameras were more limited at the time than silent movies had been wasn't such a big problem. Recently, I watched another one of those creaky old plays-turned-into-a-movie: If I Were Free.

The movie opens up in Paris in the early 1930s. Gordon Evers (Clive Brook) is a British barrister apparently on vacation, talking to his friend Hector (Henry Stephenson) about his bordeom with life as well as revealing that he's got a war wound from the Great War, that being bullet fragments still in his chest. To top things off, he's in one of those proverbial loveless marriages with a wife who's waffling over whether to grant him a divorce. At first she says yes, then no.

Hector has some other friends, the Franco-American couple the Casenoves. Wife Sarah (Irene Dunne) was a decorator/antiques dealer before her marriage to Tono (Nils Asther). Tono is a drinker and a womanizer, and is about to head off to the south of France with his latest mistress, leaving Sarah in the lurch. Since you've got two people each in a marriage without love, and since one's a man and the other a woman, it doesn't take too much to figure out what happens next, which that they commiserate about their respectively similar plights and fall in love along the way.

So Gordon suggests that Sarah follow him back to England and set up an antiques dealership there. That will get her some money, and allow the two of them to be able to continue their "friendship". As you might expect, however, the relationship does not come without all sorts of baggage attached. The two would be willing to get married, but there's the question of whether both of them will be able to get out of their marriages. And then there's the perceived class difference which nowadays wouldn't be such a big deal and frankly looking at it as an American is something I don't see as that big of a class difference anyway. But for the people in Gordon's social circle it would have been an issue. And that's even not taking into account the other spouses part. Gordon is up for a judgeship, and if news of his relationship with Sarah were to become too public, there goes his chances at becoming a judge. With that in mind, Hector suggests to Sarah that she write Gordon a break-up note because it would be the best for Gordon's career.

At this point the movie takes a sudden and frankly ridiculous veer into the melodramatic. That old war wound Gordon has starts acting up, and like Bette Davis in Dark Victory, it's "prognosis negative". Well, almost negative, in that there's a very risky operation that has maybe a one percent chance of success. But it doesn't take much to figure out where the rest of the movie is going.

If I Were Free is based on a play by John Van Druten, a name you might recognize since he also turned the stories that became I Remember Mama into a stage play, along with turning some of Christoper Isherwood's stories into the play I Am a Camera that would later get adapted to Cabaret. If I Were Free has all the feel of a stage play, and it has a very dated 1930s feel to it. This is material that I can see audiences back in the day liking. And, to be fair to the cast and crew, they do a very professional job taking the material they're given and turning it into a programmer. But boy is it something else 90 years later.

To be honest, if I were introducing people to early sound movies, If I Were Free wouldn't be my first choice by a mile. But people who are already big fans of early 1930s movies probably won't mind watching the cast go through their paces on this one.