J. Walter Ruben's No Other Woman 1933

 No Other Woman is an impressive pre-code B picture, a melodrama and a soap opera with montages by the famous Slavko Vorkapich and intense performances from hard-working Irene Dunne and rough-around-the-edges Charles Bickford.  Dunne runs a boarding house and wants to get out of the steel mill company town where Bickford is a higher-up working stiff in the mill.  They get married and fight and Bickford drinks, until boarder Eric Linden, an amateur chemist, discovers a formula for dyes that makes them all rich, whereupon Bickford takes up with another woman (femme fatale Gwili Andre) and wants a divorce.  Bickford bribes the servants to testify that Dunne was unfaithful, she responds with the lie that Bickford is not the father of their child and Bickford calls a halt to the divorce proceedings.  Meanwhile, the business goes bankrupt and Bickford goes back to the steel mill, where Dunne finds him and they forgive each other.

This emotional roller coaster is directed with impressive speed (the film is less than an hour long) and finesse by J.Walter Ruben, who directed nineteen movies (I have not seen any of the others) before his death at the age of 43 in 1942.  This kind of contentious divorce, with both sides lying, marks this as a pre-code film, as does the double bed for the married couple.  The screenplay is by Wanda Tuchock (who wrote King Vidor's marvelous Bird of Paradise in 1932) and Bernard Schubert from a play by Eugene Walter. Irene Dunne and Charles Bickford each made five films in 1933 while cinematographer Edward Cronjager (who later photographed Lubitsch's Heaven Can Wait in 1942) was cinematographer on seven movies that year.