The Gay Divorcee

The Gay Divorcee is a 1934 American musical film directed by Mark Sandrich and starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. It also features Alice Brady, Edward Everett Horton, Eric Blore, and Erik Rhodes. The screenplay was written by George Marion Jr., Dorothy Yost, and Edward Kaufman. It was based on the Broadway musical Gay Divorce, written by Dwight Taylor with Kenneth S. Webb and Samuel Hoffenstein adapting an unproduced play by J. Hartley Manners. The stage version included many songs by Cole Porter which were left out of the film, except for "Night and Day". Though most of the songs were replaced, the screenplay kept the original plot of the stage version. Three members of the play's original cast repeated their stage roles: Astaire, Rhodes, and Eric Blore. The Hays Office insisted that RKO change the name from "Gay Divorce" to "The Gay Divorcee", on the grounds that while a divorcée could be gay or lighthearted, it would be unseemly to allow a divorce to appear so. According to Astaire, the change was made proactively by RKO. The director, Mark Sandrich, told him that The Gay Divorcee was selected as the new name because the studio "thought it was a more attractive-sounding title, centered around a girl." RKO even offered fifty dollars to any employee who could come up with a better title. In the United Kingdom, the film was released with the title The Gay Divorce. This film was the second (after Flying Down to Rio, 1933) of ten pairings of Astaire and Rogers on film.