DON’T CHANGE YOUR HUSBAND

Cecil B. De Mille, one of the founding fathers of cinema, had found his perfect leading lady in the provocative Gloria Swanson, alongside whom he played himself in Billy Wilder’s ‘Sunset Boulevard’. Towards the end of the 1910s, De Mille conceived a directing (and production) strategy that focused on spectacularity through drama and, more precisely, brilliant comedy with an erotic background, which heralded the new morals of the 1920s, and contributed to the formation of a new diva model, a fatal and unscrupulous woman, perfectly embodied by Swanson. In the funny ‘Don’t Change Your Husband’, Swanson is a bored housewife whose husband, a wealthy businessman (Elliott Dexter), pays more attention to his work than to her. She becomes involved with a young lover (Lew Cody), whom she marries after divorcing her boring husband. But Swanson soon discovers that her new husband is just as negligent as her first, although after a few fights, things eventually work out. A very popular film at the time, it is one of the films that helped make Gloria Swanson a worldwide star, even though she was only 20 years old at the time.