Lloyd Bacon's Office Wife (1930)

Lloyd Bacon directed 130 films, beginning in 1922.  He was workmanlike and his best films depended on good screenplays, such as Frank Tashlin's for Bacon's The Good Humor Man (1950, see my post of Sept. 22, 2016).  Office Wife, however, has a mediocre screenplay, by Charles Kenyon, but does have an interesting number of tracking shots (without dialogue) for a film from the early sound area, though its main interest these days is the loose morality of a pre-code film.  The film starts out with an apparent lesbian (Blanche Friderici in a man's suit and tie, smoking a big cigar) getting a new writing assignment from publisher Lewis Stone, to write about the importance of a secretary as an "office wife."  Then Stone's secretary (Dale Fuller) faints when she hears that Stone is getting married and she is replaced by Dorothy Mackaill (a star of silent films who made only a handful of sound films).

Of course Mackaill falls in love with Stone and then she feels she has to resign, since she knows Stone is married.  Mackaill's sister, (played by Joan Blondell,  whose liveliness  is to the sound era what Mackaill's beauty was to the silent era) finds out that Stone's wife (Natalie Moorhead) has been unfaithful to Stone and has asked for a divorce and Stone and Mackaill cement their relationship with a kiss on the beach under the moon.

Mackaill and Blondell live together and Bacon and cinematographer William Rees never miss a chance to show their legs or the two women in their underwear.  The typing pool is all women, of course, and the executives are all male, perhaps offensive now but accurate enough in 1930 (even well into the sixties graduates of Vassar and Smith went to secretarial school first before trying to break into publishing.)