Our Betters Reviews

Our Betters wants to both titillate us with its tale of the idle rich and their different rules for love, marriage, and society while finger wagging over amorality. It wants to build up its main character, an American socialite who married into the British upper class, while also slut shaming her to an absurd degree. Too wooden, too meandering, and populated by actors who can’t find the right undertone of frivolity-meets-acid, Our Betters is a misfire from George Cukor, a sophist director who seemed attuned to this material on paper.

 

There’s not much in the way of an actual plot so much as a series of vignettes loosely tied together around themes of love sought for convenience, either economic, social, or desperation (often a combination) but never from a place of love. Constance Bennett’s socialite learns that her husband married her for money on their wedding day by overhearing him talk to his girlfriend. Her pride is wounded, but she carries on and becomes the most powerful member of the upper crust’s freak show of kept men, aging dowagers, and effete male companions.

 

Bennett is not at ease with the material as she was the tough, workaday waitress-turned-star in What Price Hollywood?, and her awkwardness with the rhythms of a drawing room comedy make for an uneven experience. She’s fantastic during a late scene where she lashes out at those were judge her for crafting a life of privilege and power on her own terms but can’t quite deliver the flowery wordplay with as much ease. She isn’t alone as no one seems quite attuned to the musical and muscular structure of the script, especially an American boy played by Charles Starrett.

 

It all comes to a climax that feels less like the ending of a film and more like everyone just got tired of trying. As if everyone involved just decided this scene was good enough and decided to move on with their lives. This leaves Our Betters an incomplete work, a thinly sketched series of moments in search of a wider organizing principle.   

So precode and adult, in spite of a semi washed up ending. Anita Louise goes pure to America, Constance Bennett remains happy and cinic in her way in England.