Merrily We Go to Hell: Gingerbread, Cake, and Crème de Menthe

The song appears once again later in the film when Joan, who has exchanged glamorous gowns for a housedress and apron, tries to make dinner for Jerry and their friends. Jerry has received three rejections for his play, and Joan tries to cheer him up by singing the song. She sings her version softly and hesitantly, and it lands with a thud. Jerry’s mood changes only with the arrival of a telegram with the good news that his play has found a producer. It will take several more scenes for Jerry to detach from Joan, start drinking again, and take up with his leading lady, but the magic between them, along with any promises of gingerbread and cake and crème de menthe, at least for the time being, has vanished.

Merrily We Go to Hell was directed by Dorothy Arzner, the only woman to be making studio films in the thirties, and it shares with other Arzner films, such as Christopher Strong (1933) and Craig’s Wife (1936), a focus on the dynamics of heterosexual courtship and marriage. Merrily is a damning portrait of the stakes of marriage, in which the woman takes on the burden of loving a man who is too narcissistic and oblivious to pay attention to her. The humor and banter of the film mask the underlying emotional turmoil. Jerry may be the theater person, but Joan’s happiness and devotion are the true performances, attempts to cover up her desperation. She tries to step up to the challenge of making a life with her husband; Jerry’s only commitment is to the bottle, so much so that he cannot even utter the one phrase Joan longs to hear: “I love you.” Marriages often do not work out well in Arzner’s films, but Merrily We Go to Hell may be her most cynical take on the institution’s effects on women. The heroines of Christopher Strong and Craig’s Wife have female friendship to buffer them, even if those friendships do not provide any kind of respite in the end. In other Arzner films that focus on romance, the friendships between women characters are just as important as the heterosexual love plots, as in The Wild Party (1929) and Dance, Girl, Dance (1940). But Joan’s one female friend, Charlcie, abandons her, while Vi, a jaded older woman, virtually disappears after offering Joan advice.

Like many of the women actors who worked with Arzner, Sylvia Sidney was an emerging young star (she was twenty-one when she appeared in Merrily We Go to Hell). Sidney’s diminutive size was often emphasized in both her film roles and publicity about her (an August 1932 Screenland article about the actor’s new home shows her dwarfed by her surroundings and is titled “Little Girl—Big House”). It would have been easy for Arzner and crew to play to Sidney’s petite size, thus affirming her diminishment in her marriage, but however hurt and desperate Joan may be in the film, she is not portrayed as a tiny, helpless victim. For example, after Jerry and Joan’s first encounter, we see Joan in her mansion in a long shot as she bounces down a huge staircase. She is a small figure in the image and might seem dwarfed by her surroundings (little girl, great big house indeed). In this film, though, her energetic movements and her ebullient laughter light up the formal space and bring it to life. Her shoes click loudly as she comes down the stairs, echoing the tap dancing of Jerry’s friend Buck in the previous scene. Her vital presence overwhelms the space, rather than vice versa, and Arzner’s presentation of her in this way constitutes a feminist response to the common image of Sidney—and other actresses, for that matter—as being physically insignificant. Arzner’s heroines may often appear to be typically feminine, but they take up much more room and generate much more activity than the characters usually played by Hollywood starlets at the time.

Joan’s story is told most forcefully in close-ups that reveal Sidney’s most striking characteristic: her expressive face, in which sadness and joy are visible at the same time. She tries desperately to grow into her new role as wife to an unstable man. If she laughs, she always seems on the verge of tears, and if she cries, she seems to be on the verge of laughter. Yet some close-ups of Joan’s face convey more depth than her laughter, or tears, might suggest. A significant moment in the film occurs after Jerry fails to show up at their engagement party, because he has passed out in the back seat of a taxi. Joan is furious and sad, and she drives off, alone, in her car. For once, she has mobility (usually Jerry drives her car). Arzner shows her in close-up as her face registers disappointment, anger, and desperation all at once. The image dissolves from the close-up of Joan to images of church bells ringing. Given Jerry’s failure to appear at the party, it is hard to believe that the bells signal Joan’s wedding to Jerry, but they do. The dissolve from Joan’s face to the bells suggests more than her despair; it affirms, however paradoxically, her determination to make the marriage work. Yet when we see the wedding in a long shot, with Joan now appearing as a tiny figure engulfed by the guests and the wedding party and the space of the chapel, she is diminished. The transition from Jerry’s absence to Joan’s car ride to the wedding happens very quickly in the film, yet that single close-up, with its fleeting promise of action on Joan’s part, demonstrates that there is little space in the world that she inhabits for a woman to drive anywhere but to the altar.