Trailer
Plot summary
Dancer Guy Holden and his friend Egbert Fitzgerald, an English lawyer, are dining in a Paris nightclub when each finds he has no wallet. Guy performs for the room to settle the bill. On the crossing to England he meets Mimi Glossop, whose dress is trapped in a closing trunk; he tears the skirt and lends her his coat, and she posts it without leaving an address, so he searches London for her. Mimi wants a divorce; her husband, the geologist Cyril Glossop, has been away a long time. Her much-married Aunt Hortense brings her to Egbert, once Hortense's fiancé, and he plans a night at a Brightbourne seaside hotel where a hired co-respondent, Rodolfo Tonetti, is to catch her in a staged affair. Egbert supplies Mimi with a code phrase to use on the man.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Gay Divorcee (1934)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The Continental won the first Academy Award for Best Original Song. The prize recognized its elaboration in a song-and-dance sequence of more than 16 minutes toward the end of the film, sung by Ginger Rogers, Erik Rhodes and Lillian Miles and danced by Rogers, Fred Astaire and ensemble performers.
- The film's title was changed from the stage musical's Gay Divorce to The Gay Divorcee. One account says the Hays Office insisted, finding the original title "too frivolous toward marriage", because a divorcée could be lighthearted but a divorce should not appear so.
- The stage version of Gay Divorce had many Cole Porter songs, but they were all left out of the film except for "Night and Day". Even so, the screenplay kept the original plot of the stage show.
- James Wingate, RKO's Director of Studio Relations, warned that the delicate subject matter required great care in the scenes dealing with Mimi's lingerie, and insisted that no actor or actress appear in only pajamas.
- Fred Astaire sings "Night and Day" and dances it with Ginger Rogers in a hotel suite overlooking an English Channel beach at night. It was the pair's first romantic dance duet in film.
- The car Ginger Rogers drove in the film was her own, a 1929 Duesenberg Model J. It still exists and has been displayed at least once at the Amelia Island Car Show, Concours d'Elegance.
