Her Cardboard Lover

The great Norma Shearer gave her last performance in this adaptation of a 1926 farce by the French playwright Jacques Deval (translated by P.G. Wodehouse!) about a young woman who, in a last-ditch effort to fend off a stubborn ex, hires a man to pose as her new lover. Cukor had directed a production of the play in the mid-1920s, and though there were hiccups aplenty in the transition from stage to screen—the rise of the Legion of Decency, for instance, meant that the ex in question had to be demoted from husband to boyfriend—he nonetheless filled the resulting film with poignant details and graceful comic touches.