Tomorrow, October 22, is the birthday of actress Constance Bennett, but I already have a post planned for tomorrow for a movie that's airing early in the morning of October 23, so my Bennett mention is coming a day before her birthday. And, it's not as if TCM is doing anything for Bennett's birthday this year since they're running a bunch of horror stuff. But I had a movie on my DVR starring Bennett, and saw that I hadn't done a post on it before, so I watched it, wrote up, and scheduled this review. That movie is Sin Takes a Holiday.
Constance Bennett stars as Sylvia Brenner, who ekes out a living as a secretary to upper-crust divorce lawyer Gaylord Stanton (Kenneth MacKenna). As such, she sees all the ways wealthy women try to obtain divorces but have trouble doing it since no-fault divorce was not a thing back in the day. The low income also forces Sylvia to live with roommates, which isn't really that germane to the plot beyond highlighting Sylvia's economic circumstances and allowing us to mention ZaSu Pitts' presence in the cast as Sylvia's roommate.
Sylvia has a flame for Gaylord, not that she could talk about it, and not that he has the same feelings. Gaylord isn't a jerk; he just sees Sylvia as a co-worker and at best a friend. After all, he is her boss. Gaylord prefers dalliances with married women, largely because he's not ready to marry and knows how they can't really get a divorce quickly so the relationship can never progress too far, which is how he likes things. That is, until one such married woman, Grace (Rita LaRoy), decides that she's planning to get a divorce from her husband so that she can marry Gaylord.
Poor Gaylord is in a quandary, so he offers a proposal to Sylvia. One is that it is in fact a marriage proposal. But the other point is that it's a business proposition. Sylvia should enter into a sham marriage with Gaylord, with the agreement that they can get a divorce in a year. Gaylord will even provide Sylvia with the money to live abroad for a year. What Gaylord gets is the ability to tell Grace that he's already got a wife, and the evidence to prove that he's not lying about it. Sylvia accepts, and promptly sets off for Paris.
On the boat there, she meets one of Gaylord's acquaintances, Reggie Durant (Basil Rathbone), who is a decided bachelor who avoids relationships in New York but not in Europe. So he decides to help Sylvia out, falling in love with her even though she's technically married. But then the agreement is that she only has to be married to Gaylord for a year. This, even though she should know that it might not be so easy to get a divorce once that year is up since she and Gaylord will need to show cause. Eventually, Sylvia decides to go back to New York to have it out with Gaylord so that the two can decide their futures.
Sin Takes a Holiday is one of those early talkies (this one was released in late 1930) that show a decidedly different set of social mores than what we have nowadays, and for that, it's interesting. But it's also the sort of material that's going to be a bit difficult for people who aren't big fans of old movies already, largely because trying to understand people's character motivations within the confines of those social mores can sometimes seem baffling. Sin Takes a Holiday also doesn't sparkle the way that some comedies dealing with upper-crust divorce from that era did. In short, Sin Takes a Holiday is another of those movies where nobody involved should have felt embarrassed about having been involved with it, but where it's also obvious why it's not well-remembered almost a century on.
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