What Was That?

Gregory La Cava's She Married Her Boss (1935), starring Claudette Colbert and Melvyn Douglas, is a decidely minor romantic comedy. I watched it a few days ago and wouldn't comment on it except for certain social and political reasons.

It's fascinating to see how times have changed. The film openly supports beating a child long enough and hard enough until she screams. It teaches that no matter how successful a women is in business, her real job is marriage. And it assumes drunk driving is funny.

But one can see these attitudes in other films of the era. What really shocked me was Claudette Colbert mentioning--in passing, not pro or con--the Dred Scott decision. It's just a quick gag, and I have to assume it was slyly inserted by Sidney Buchman, who would later be blacklisted for not naming names.