A BILL OF DIVORCEMENT (1932) 1/12/05. Reviewed by Michael Clark Katherine Hepburn, in her first screen role, John Barrymore and Billie Burke star in an often overlooked melodrama of mental illness and eugenics.

As might be expected - given the increasingly important place of genetics in contemporary biomedical science and society's fascination with the idea of the gene and the image of the double helix as cultural icons - nearly all the best-known English-language fiction films in which genetics or genetic engineering play a prominent part date only from the past 25 years or so.

However, in 'A Bill of Divorcement' we see genetics – or rather, early 20th-century medical ideas about the importance of heredity as a cause of mental illness – take centre stage in a prestigious Hollywood production intended for a mass audience dating from the very earliest days of talking pictures.

Film credits

• RKO Radio Pictures, Inc., 1932; 70 mins
• Screenplay by Howard Estabrook and Harry Wagstaff Gribble from
• an original stage play by 'Clemence Dane' (Winifred Ashton)
• Cinematography by Sidney Hickox
• Directed by George Cukor
• Produced by David O Selznick

Principal Cast

• Sydney Fairfield: Katherine Hepburn
• Hilary: John Barrymore
• Margaret Fairfield: Billie Burke
• Aunt Hester Fairfield: Elizabeth Patterson
• Kit Humphreys: David Manners
• Gray Meredith: Paul Cavanagh
• Dr Alliot: Henry Stephenson

A strange mixture of melodrama, 'weepie' and social problem movie, the 1932 version of 'A Bill of Divorcement' was the second of three film adaptations of the English actress, painter and playwright Clemence Dane's very successful 1921 London stage play of the same title.

Like the play, 'A Bill of Divorcement' is set in an upper-middle-class English family and country house at Christmas time in the early 1930s – a kind of 'alternative present', by the time the film was made. On the fateful day in question, Hilary Fairfield (John Barrymore), a former Army officer and gifted musician, arrives home after escaping from a private asylum - "That place", as he calls it - where he has been confined as a lunatic for the previous 15 years. Hilary believes himself to have recovered fully from his illness, "brought on", as we are told, by 'shell-shock' in the First World War, and is determined to pick up the threads of his former life with his beloved wife Margaret (Billie Burke). However, unbeknown to Hilary, Margaret has just obtained a divorce from him on the grounds of his prolonged mental unfitness, and is all set to remarry and begin a new life with her lover Gray Meredith (Paul Cavanagh).

Chaos ensues, as the wavering Margaret is torn between the demands of her old and new loves, and her daughter Sydney (Katherine Hepburn, in her first screen role) is forced to reappraise her own engagement to Kit (David Manners) in the light of her sudden introduction to the father whom she never knew but allegedly so much resembles.

The impasse is only resolved when Sydney, who is made of altogether sterner stuff than her mother, enlists the help of the outwardly benevolent but very authoritarian family doctor Dr Alliot (Henry Stephenson) and makes her mother's mind up for her, allowing Margaret to leave with her lover, while she herself chooses to dismiss her own fiancé and stay with her half-crazed father, renouncing her own prospects of marriage and motherhood when she learns from Dr Alliot that insanity is hereditary in the Fairfield blood-line to which she belongs. So, to the accompaniment of crashing piano discords instead of swelling violins, the film has a distinctly unhappy, even tragic, ending, with father and daughter locked into a kind of folie à deux of Hilary's making but Sydney's own choosing.

Actress, novelist, artist, feminist and playwright, 'Clemence Dane' (a.k.a. Winifred Ashton, 1888-1965), the author of the original stage-play, was a woman of many parts, but genetics was not among her accomplishments. Although the idea of heredity as an inescapable destiny, and more specific notions of hereditary mental taint and the desirability of medical regulation of marriage and procreation on eugenic lines feature prominently in both the play and the film, neither version goes into any detail with regard to genetics. "It's in our blood, isn't it?... latent insanity brought on by shell-shock?", asks Sydney when she learns that her father had always been emotionally unstable and that her late Aunt Grace was 'not herself' for many years, but this is the most explicit statement about the presumed hereditary transmission of mental illness made anywhere in the play or the film.

The play contains an explicit reference to eugenics, but this is omitted in the film. However, Dr Alliot's stern remarks about the need to avoid transmitting insanity to future generations survived in their entirety from play to film, and the British and American theatre- and film-going publics can hardly have failed to absorb the clear eugenic message. Indeed, the adaptation of the original stage-play for the cinema had the effect of intensifying this particular interest, for whereas much of the emphasis in Clemence Dane's play had been on the need for reform of English divorce law, and the hypocrisy of conventional religious attitudes towards both madness and divorce, in the Hollywood version these more specifically English concerns and the attack on conventional religion were quietly dropped and the more universally interesting themes of the heredity of madness and the eugenic regulation of marriage and procreation foregrounded instead.

What is perhaps most interesting, or alarming, for today's audience is Sydney's reaction on learning that her family's hereditary tendency towards mental illness threatens her plans to marry Kit and have children. Although otherwise so independent in her attitudes and behaviour, Sydney does not for a moment question the validity of Dr Alliot's categorical statement of what she takes to be the medical facts about insanity in her family. But although she accepts the verdict of medicine, she still chooses her own destiny by an act (or rather, series of acts) of free will, and thereby achieves a truly tragic status. Though Sydney's choice can hardly be regarded as a realistic or relevant example, it still presents an uncomfortable challenge to those of us faced with difficult genetic choices today.

The action of 'A Bill of Divorcement' all takes place at Christmas time, and from a film critic's standpoint it must indeed be reckoned something of a turkey. By today's standards, the plot and the action appear melodramatic and contrived, the direction unimaginative and fitful, the dialogue stilted, and much of the acting theatrical in the worst sense, while the script is full of absurdities and the English accents are all over the place.

Yet it was a prestige production involving some of the best-known figures in Hollywood, which enjoyed both critical acclaim and popular success at the time, and is still strangely moving even today for its compelling portrait of emotional instability, its tragic sense of human destiny, and for Katherine Hepburn's powerful, if uneven, performance in the role of Sydney Fairfield, a character who would not seem out of place in a play by Eugene O'Neill or Tennessee Williams. No wonder Hepburn stole all the limelight in this role, just as Meg Albanesi had done in the same role when the play was first produced in 1921.

It may seem strange to review a film released more than 70 years ago and largely forgotten today except by a few classic-cinema buffs, film historians and devoted fans of Katherine Hepburn. However, 'A Bill of Divorcement' does provide a vivid insight into popular beliefs about the role of heredity in shaping individual character and destiny, the emotionally traumatic effects of shell-shock, the incurability of mental illness, and the moral and scientific authority of medicine, in the early decades of the last century. For all its lack of any serious genetic background, it serves to remind us just how influential hereditarian and eugenic ideas were, even in progressive circles, in an era that knew nothing of DNA or genes nor yet of the horrors soon to be perpetrated by the Nazis in the name of eugenics.

Michael Clark is a research associate of the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London, and a freelance writer on medical and scientific film and television.

Links

Internet Movie Database: 'A Bill of Divorcement'