La Cava's talents as a metteur-en-scene largely focused on describing the contrary milieus of bare survival and excessive opulence.
--Roger McNiven, American Directors (McGraw-Hill, 1983)
Gregory La Cava is a superb director of ambiguities who is little known to most filmgoers; even his best known film, My Man Godfrey (1936), is seldom seen these days. La Cava can be very serious and very funny in the same film, as he is with The Age of Consent, a pre code film from 1933 about college students that could be made today, as brains and sex drives clash. Michael Harvey (Richard Cromwell) and Betty Cameron (Dorothy Wilson)are college sophomores who want to get married, but Betty thinks they should wait until they graduate. Michael is annoyed, so when he sees townie waitress Dora Swale (Arline Judge) lift up her stocking and adjust her garter he agrees to come home with her. They get drunk and it is broadly hinted that they had sex together; they fall sleep, her father comes home and says Dora and Michael have to get married or Michael will go to jail (it is suggested that Dora is a minor but we are never actually given any ages). Meanwhile, Betty has gone on a drive with Duke Galloway (Eric Linden), who picks up girls by demonstrating the seat cushions in his new car -- "just like a hotel, but you don't have to check in"-- just before the judge arrives to marry Michael and Dora.
Mr. Swale (Reginald Barlow) thinks Michael has been corrupted by college, where so-called "free love" is promoted and when Dora asks "what about my happiness?" Swale says that is irrelevant, because it's a matter of right and wrong. Dora says "what if what you think is right is actually wrong?" Betty and Duke are in an accident and everything gets more of less sorted out, though as Betty and Michael leave on their honeymoon it is a question whether the marriage will work, just as Michael's professor and Betty's landlady had once been in love but grew apart and now, twenty years later, each is on their own as they bid farewell to Betty and Michael.
This efficient film, slightly more that an hour long, leaves open the question of happiness, something one has to find on one's own; there's not a formula that works for everyone. It's from a play by Martin Flavin, screenplay by Sarah Mason, and the crisp cinematography by J. Roy Hunt, one of nine films he photographed in 1933.
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