Alfred E. Green's Housewife (1934)

"There's no such a thing as friendship between a married man and a woman like Pat."
--Ann Dvorak in Housewife.
,
Housewife is a well-crafted and brisk entertainment (69 minutes) in the early Warner Brothers style.  Ann Dvorak plays George Brent's wife who pushes him to start his own advertising agency and, after he does, he takes up with copywriter Bette Davis (still a blonde, as she was in her earlier movies).  Brent tries to leave Dvorak but their young child is injured and the parents reconcile in divorce court.  The film makes good use of the regular Warner Brothers character actors -- Ruth Donnelly, John Halliday, Hobart Cavanaugh, et al. -- and is shot mostly in effective medium shots by cinematographer William Rees.  The scene that best combines satire with realism is a radio show that is totally inappropriate for one of Brent's clients; he was too busy with Bette Davis to oversee the show.

Ann Dvorak was a low-key actress and after her excellent start in Howard Hawks's Scarface (1932) she fought --usually unsuccessfully -- for good parts, one of the few later ones being in Albert Lewin's The Private Affairs of Bel Ami  (1947).  Director Alfred Greene churned out routinely good films for WB in the thirties (my favorite of which is the complex and rich Union Depot,1932) and later turned to television. I have never understood the appeal, if any, of George Brent, but he did have a long career and was considered Bette Davis's favorite co-star, perhaps because his insipidness made her flamboyance stand out even more.

Housewife is not without irony. Ann Dvorak says to outsiders, at the beginning and the end of the film, that she is "just a housewife," though she has proven she is so much more, as she has made the necessary suggestions to fix a sponsor's radio show.