Edith Wharton was born in 1862 so she had some firsthand knowledge of "the gilded age" when she wrote The Age of Innocence in 1920. The film was directed by Phillip Moeller who was mainly a stage director, except for one other movie, and used both elements of the book and of Margaret Ayer Barnes's stage adaptation; the script is by Sarah Mason and Victor Heerman. Moeller's film is much kinder to the upper-class denizens of 1870's New York than Wharton's novel is, emphasizing how trapped they were in the mores and customs of the time (as too many of us often are). Irene Dunne soars as the complex Ellen Oleska, who tells Newland Archer (scheduled to marry Ellen's cousin) that they can't run away together because when Europeans flee to America and Americans flee to Europe nothing changes (Ellen wants to divorce her Polish aristocratic husband but her family doesn't want the scandal).
The film of The Age of Innocence is an emotional melodrama, sometimes derisively called a "soap opera" because radio versions had soap companies as sponsors, though it is a genre which has appealed to some very talented directors, including John M. Stahl (who made Back Street with Dunne and John Boles, who played Newland Archer, in 1932), Frank Borzage, and Douglas Sirk, directors that are not afraid to appeal to the emotions within layers of irony. Moeller heightens the emotion and the irony by framing the story as a flashback, with Newland Archer deciding not to see Ellen after twenty-six years, preferring to remember her as she was .
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