Merrily We Go to Hell

1932 Directed by Dorothy Arzner

In her innocence she expected days and nights of tender love. What she got was a Bitter Shock!

A drunken newspaperman, Jerry Corbett, is rescued from his alcoholic haze by an heiress, Joan Prentice, whose love sobers him up and encourages him to write a play, but he lapses back into dipsomania.

Sylvia Sidney Fredric March Adrianne Allen Richard 'Skeets' Gallagher George Irving Esther Howard Charles Coleman Cary Grant Florence Britton Kent Taylor Robert Greig Ernie Adams Mildred Boyd Edna Callahan Leonard Carey Harry Cording Milla Davenport Neal Dodd Jay Eaton Bill Elliott Mary Halsey Theresa Harris Amo Ingraham LeRoy Mason Edwin Maxwell Edmund Mortimer William H. O'Brien Dennis O'Keefe Tom Ricketts Show All…

83 mins More details at IMDb TMDb Report this film

Popular reviews

Review by eely ★★★½

”gentlemen, i give you the holy state of matrimony, modern style: single lives, twin beds, and triple bromides in the morning.”
imagine your wife telling you she’s bringing her side piece to a party and she shows up with CARY GRANT. i would just cut my losses at that point honestly.
Review by Joe ★★★★

or: Bittersweet-8100
Few better feelings one can get in a movie theater than that moment when you realize an old pre-code melodrama has you totally hooked and engaged with its story and characters. For me it happened during the wedding scene in this, when Frederic March starts patting around his pockets looking for Sylvia Sidney's wedding ring. I suspect most of the credit for this working as well as it does belongs to Sidney, who is just absolutely heartbreaking as a woman too good for the man she loves - but it never condescends to say she SHOULDN'T love him, which is a sentiment that for me has always been as useless in movies as it tends to be in…
Review by vincent price was 6′4″

LOVE. If there were ever a better image than a windswept, teary Sylvia Sidney driving alone at night, I haven't seen it. What a perfect performance.
Review by Elizabeth 🥀 ★★★★

I can't be jealous of someone I never really had

Merrily We Go to Hell, is a film that grazes the surface of alcoholism and the pain and distrust it brings to those who love them -- even the most brilliant of minds can be tormented by the constant need for a drink. Many a times alcohol takes a hold of the person and their true behavior never comes through and they do things in a daze. These instances can have horrible outcomes, even losing the one you truly love, in the end.

Sylvia Sidney plays an outstanding role and performance as a wife trying to desperately hold on to her husband and change him for the better. Though sometimes it takes more than love to bring people out of the grasps of alcoholism - those who have lived it understand it and those who haven't I hope you never have to.
Review by Ziglet_mir ★★★ 2

Joan Prentice: Gentlemen, I give you the holy state of matrimony, modern style: single lives, twin beds and triple bromides in the morning.
Very much in the same vein as Days of Wine and Roses and The Lost Weekend, Merrily We Go To Hell is the close look at the effects of alcoholism and the major strain it applies to marriage. Dorothy Arzner throws some innovative ideas against the wall for 1932. The film holds itself up well for today’s standards and will surprise most people at its reflective commentary toward society with an all-too uncommon ending based in the snug cradle of reality.
Fredric March’s aloof and dependent Jerry Corbett suffers from a mixture of poor decision making and…
Review by Sara ★★★½ 2

I love this title because it’s many of us in 2020. So merry and grateful we have a job but going out to hell every day as we take public transit to work in the middle of a pandemic
Review by Jaime Rebanal ★★★★½ 3

If you're going to talk about Dorothy Arzner, one also mustn't ignore the ways in which she became a pioneer for queer filmmaking from the day, especially considering the way she codes such subtext within her work. Merrily We Go to Hell also might just be the most fitting title for a film of this sort, especially when it starts off like any other romantic comedy would before turning into a much darker film as it goes on. But there's a lot to admire about how Dorothy Arzner breaks down gender conventions as they lead into heightened melodrama, though all of it still works beautifully for what it is.
I think I just need more of her films in my life right now.
52 Films by Women: #52
Review by nora ★★★½

i keep reading the title of this movie to the tune of “merrily we roll along” and thinking about how cary grant is always trying to destroy a marriage
Review by Zoë 🐝 ★★★½ 5

Thank you to Erik for the recommendation!
I'm having the best time watching Dorothy Arzner's movies. While this one wasn't as good as "Craig's Wife", I still liked it a lot and thought it had a lot of really interesting things to say, even if some of them weren't fully explored.
This was my first Sylvia Sidney movie, and I'm really excited to explore more of her filmography, because I loved her here. She expressed such raw emotion, and really pulled me in no matter if the scene was romantic or tragic. In the beginning of the film, I could really feel the interest and then love that she had for Gerald. Something about her acting just made the emotions…
Review by sakana1 ★★★★

This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

This is brutal and devastating. While it ostensibly tells the story of a man's collapse and recovery (and collapse and recovery, and collapse and recovery), it's clear the moment we meet Jerry (Fredric March) that he has, in fact, already fallen. The deep, fatalistic cynicism of the "merrily we go to hell" refrain from the first time we hear it is evidence that he long ago gave up on the battle for control over his own life -- we are merely here to witness the inevitable results of his capitulation.
On the other side of this life we have Joan (Sylvia Sydney), a young woman as idealistic and hopeful as Jerry is resigned and lost. The steps she goes through…
Review by Fint ★★★½ 2

What starts off as a frothy-seeming romantic encounter develops into a toxic marriage and a perfectly titled film with darkness at its heart. Rich gal Sylvia Sidney loves unreliable alcoholic Fredric March and as he becomes more wayward, he starts to drag her down with him. Sylvia suffers exquisitely as only she could, Fredric makes a convincing drunk, his Mr Hyde bubbling under the jolly exterior, and Dorothy Arzner directs with panache.
Review by rischka ★★★

although there were a number of female directors in hollywood in the silent era, by the 30s there was only one getting regular work: dorothy arzner, who progressed from stenographer through script writer and editor at paramount to finally direct her own pictures. hollywood has always been a boy's club and dorothy had to play hardball while being careful not to try anything too unconventional for the studio bosses. this is a pretty standard melodrama about the charming but drunken frederic march and rich, beautiful but naive sylvia sidney, out to save him from himself. she keeps him sober long enough to write a successful play, only to discover he's still carrying a torch for his ex who has been…

Recent reviews

Review by Elizabeth 🥀 ★★★★

I can't be jealous of someone I never really had

Merrily We Go to Hell, is a film that grazes the surface of alcoholism and the pain and distrust it brings to those who love them -- even the most brilliant of minds can be tormented by the constant need for a drink. Many a times alcohol takes a hold of the person and their true behavior never comes through and they do things in a daze. These instances can have horrible outcomes, even losing the one you truly love, in the end.

Sylvia Sidney plays an outstanding role and performance as a wife trying to desperately hold on to her husband and change him for the better. Though sometimes it takes more than love to bring people out of the grasps of alcoholism - those who have lived it understand it and those who haven't I hope you never have to.
Review by Daryl Bär ★★★★

I much preferred this to Craig's Wife, although they both touch upon some similar themes. The female characters in both films have dimensionality in a way I'd not often see in films of the 1940's and 50's. While I'm sure both were intended as cautionary tales for women of the era, they take on an altogether different angle today as the romance and drama unfolds.
A man clearly suffering the affects of alcoholism marries a wealthy heiress but the spectre of his past love, which led him to the bottle, remain. The husband's unfaithfulness leads to an open marriage and a downward spiral of unhappiness rooted in the couple's mistakes. As a pre-code film, it tackles themes that seem entirely…
Review by sockdolager ★★★½

"Small pleasures, small pleasures
Who would deny us these?"
Movies about drunks (and drug addicts) can be a bit dull. Even (in parts) this interesting early example by Dorothy Arzner - then Hollywood's only female director. I'm really not sure what Sylvia Sydney's Joan sees in Frederic March's Jerry. He's rather a boozy bore from the start. But she soon agrees to his proposal, and so lets us in for an anxious ride. With a lot more 'issues' besides alcoholism up for discussion. The New York Times critic called it "unedifying." Just wait 'til he sees 'Requiem for a Dream'!
Watch out, towards the end, for the scene stealing florist (uncredited) with the anxious manner and heavy accent. "Ah but I can't keep on sending then there and getting them back, sending them there and getting them back!" Small pleasures.
Review by FawkesBox ★★★★

Fredric March sexy 💔
Review by Ben Reyes ★★★★★

With the sort of frankness that wouldn't really appear again until at least the 60s, Merrily We Go to Hell is a distinctly pre-Code study of alcoholism and star crossed lovers, as a kindhearted heiress (Sylvia Sidney) falls in love with s hard drinking reporter (Fredric March), and manages to sober him up. But soon, his addiction and past passions rear their ugly heads, and the marriage begins to implode.
Dorothy Arzner, notable not just for being the first woman to be indicted to the DGA, but also as an open lesbian, in the thirties no less, helms the film with a brisk but increasingly dark sense of timing and character focus, as the dynamic between our two star crossed lovers…
Review by waltermr ★★★★

Merrily she went to hell.
Review by collinodonnell ★★½

A perfectly conventional precode romance that finds an uneasy union between the sozzled decadence of the nouveau riche and the sheltered naïveté of old money. For a screamer of a title like Merrily We Go to Hell, it’s a mostly innocent little film with only an occasional eyebrow-raiser. Sylvia Sidney is about as far east as you can get from Mae West, coasting on her sad eyes while Fredric March doesn’t quite have the magnetism to pull off the irredeemable carousing cad who not only ruins a young woman’s life but ruins her roasted chicken, twice! The desperation of a toxic relationship colors the ending of this one a somber blue.
Review by joe2d2 ★★★

gorgeous fredric march, foreshadowing his role in 'a star is born.' starts as a comedy, and gets darker as it goes.
Review by claudia ★★★★

SHE SAID BYEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!! IM PIPING CARY GRANT NOW!!!!!!!!!
Review by sakana1 ★★★★

This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

This is brutal and devastating. While it ostensibly tells the story of a man's collapse and recovery (and collapse and recovery, and collapse and recovery), it's clear the moment we meet Jerry (Fredric March) that he has, in fact, already fallen. The deep, fatalistic cynicism of the "merrily we go to hell" refrain from the first time we hear it is evidence that he long ago gave up on the battle for control over his own life -- we are merely here to witness the inevitable results of his capitulation.
On the other side of this life we have Joan (Sylvia Sydney), a young woman as idealistic and hopeful as Jerry is resigned and lost. The steps she goes through…
Review by Kate

GET THAT CRITERION RELEASE BABEY!!!!
Review by Venus Barrington ★★★★

"Merrily We Go to Hell" shows Dorothy Arzner defying gender conventions as she provides a harrowing and distinctly feminist view of a marriage's downward spiral.