Kept Husbands (1931)
A steel magnate's pampered daughter wagers that she can get a hard-working young employee to marry her, then finds she has genuinely fallen for him. He agrees to the match but bristles at living on his father-in-law's money, and pride on both sides strains the marriage before the couple can meet as equals.
An early RKO pre-Code feature, Kept Husbands casts a young Joel McCrea opposite established star Dorothy Mackaill and turns the gender reversal of its title into a pointed look at money, class, and dependency. The copyright was never renewed, and the film lapsed into the public domain in 1959.
Background
Kept Husbands was an early RKO production directed by Lloyd Bacon, made during the transition to sound, when Hollywood’s pre-Code films were pushing against conventions about sex, class and marriage. Dorothy Mackaill and Joel McCrea play the couple, and Ned Sparks appears in a supporting role. McCrea was then a young performer whose career was just building, and the film gave him a leading role opposite an established star. The title reverses the usual expectation that a husband supports his wife, and that reversal drives much of the story.
What to watch for
The story begins with a wager by a steel magnate’s daughter that she can win the affection of a hard-working employee, but she finds she has genuinely fallen for him. The film’s central tension is the husband’s pride at living on his father-in-law’s money, which turns the marriage into a question of dependency and class. Watch how the film treats money as the real subject of its romance, with each side’s pride making happiness harder to reach. Its frankness about wealth and marriage makes it a useful example of early-1930s Hollywood, when studios were still testing how far stories could go.
