Gregory La Cava's Smart Woman 1931

Rich and poor, masters and servants, socialites and Socialists are observed side by side in La Cava's films with what appears to be a cultivated impartiality.
--Roger McNiven, American Directors Volume I, McGraw Hill 1983

Gregory La Cava is not a name remembered by many filmgoers today, though W. C. Fields (are people aware of him?) thought he had the best instincts for comedy (other than that of Fields himself).  Few of La Cava's dozen or so silent films are ever shown and he is best remembered for the so-called screwball comedy My Man Godfrey (1936), while most of his films are awaiting rediscovery.

In the pre-code days and early sound days (1929-1933) studios tended to play it safe by adopting  plays and shooting them on limited sets.  Smart Woman, from a play by Myron Fagan and an adaptation by playwright Salisbury Field, has a brief scene on a boat and the rest of it takes place in and around a large country house, owned by Mr. and Mrs Gibson (Robert Ames and Mary Astor).  Nancy Gibson comes home from France after visiting her mother there and finds her sister-in-law (Ruth Weston) and her husband's business partner (Edward Everett Horton) at home after her husband had failed to meet her at the dock.  She soon discovers that her husband has taken up with a young gold-digger (Noel Francis) and wants a divorce.  Nancy quickly recovers from the bad news and suggests inviting the gold-digger and her mother (who is always with her) for the week-end and, scheming to get her husband back, invites the wealthy Sir Guy (John Halliday)-- whom she met on the boat -- to pretend to be her lover while at the same time he is seducing Peggy, the gold-digger.  Lots of intrigue and permutations follow, worthy of P.G. Wodehouse and played with low-key and deadpan humor. The film ends with the Gibsons back together, Peggy and her mother gone, and Sir Guy melancholic after falling in love with Nancy and leaving alone.

During the thirties the male stars did not shine as much as the female ones.  Robert Ames (who died of drugs and alcohol shortly after Smart Woman was released) is, to one's modern eyes, a somewhat more ineffectual George Brent and one thinks that the luminously backlit Mary Astor (Nicholas Muscura, who photographed Out of the Past,1947, and a number of other films noirs, was the cinematographer) deserved better.