Our Betters is more of a film by Somerset Maugham than by director Cukor, who follows Maugham's brittle play without adding or opening it up, except for one distant view of a tennis court, with the women in long dresses and the men in long pants. Maugham's play was written in 1917 but not performed until after WW I for fear of offending the Americans, the play being about wealthy American women who marry impoverished British nobility: the women get a title and the men get the money. The play and the film from it have a mordant humor, rather like a darker and more melancholic Noel Coward, as (Pearl) Constance Bennett comes home from her wedding and, before even changing out of her wedding dress, overhears her new husband making love to his mistress and assuring her that nothing will change. So Pearl takes up with an older man (Minor Watson) and when she is caught making love to a gigolo (Gilbert Roland) her sugar daddy says to her, "If I leave you you'd have nobody but your husband.."
Obviously this is a pre-code film, with its cavalier attitude to marriage. Our Betters was shown on Turner Classic Movies as part of Pride Month and was introduced by host Dave Karger, who said "one can't do better than Somerset Maugham and George Cukor." Rather than talk about how their sexuality affected their work, in this film and others, Karger put most of the emphasis on the last five minutes of the film, in which Tyrell Davis appears as an obviously queer dance instructor, with painted lips and cheeks. He also gets the last line in the film as Pearl and Minnie, a duchess (the superb Violet Kimble-Cooper) embrace, "Ah, what an exquisite spectacle, two ladies of title kissing one another."
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