The Gay Divorcee

The Gay Divorcee is a 1934 American musical romantic comedy film directed by Mark Sandrich and starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. It also features Alice Brady, Edward Everett Horton, Erik Rhodes, and Eric Blore. The screenplay was written by George Marion Jr., Dorothy Yost, and Edward Kaufman. It is based on the Broadway musical Gay Divorce, written by Dwight Taylor, with Kenneth Webb and Samuel Hoffenstein adapting an unproduced play by J. Hartley Manners.

The stage version included many songs by Cole Porter that were left out of the film, except for "Night and Day". Although most of the songs were replaced, the screenplay kept the original plot of the stage version. Three members of the play's original cast repeated their stage roles: Astaire, Rhodes and Blore.

The Gay Divorcee was the second (after Flying Down to Rio) of ten pairings of Astaire and Rogers on film and their first one as a duo in leading roles.

Guy Holden, a famous American dancer, is at a Paris nightclub with his friend, scatterbrained English lawyer Egbert Fitzgerald, when they both realize that they have forgotten their wallets. After Guy dances for the audience to avoid washing dishes to work off the bill, Egbert discovers his wallet in a different pocket.

Traveling to England by ship, Guy encounters Mimi Glossop, whose dress has been caught when closing a trunk, asking Guy to call a porter to open the trunk to free her. Taking advantage of the situation, Guy teases her and attempts to free her dress, but ends up tearing the skirt at thigh level, angering Mimi. Chastised, Guy apologizes and gives Mimi his coat to cover up, and asks for her address to retrieve his coat, but Mimi insists that she will mail it back at the address he provides.

Mimi returns the coat, paying the courier not to disclose her contact information. After searching for Mimi in London for two weeks, Guy ends up serendipitously rear-ending her car in traffic. As Mimi drives away and races to evade him, he chases her into the country. Taking a shortcut, Guy sets up a fake roadblock, trapping her, offering her an impromptu picnic and casually proposing marriage. Convinced that he is insane, she rebuffs his attempts to charm her and attempts to tear up notes with his phone number (but keeps one), but he learns that her name is Mimi.

Coincidentally, Mimi seeks a divorce from her geologist husband, Cyril Glossop, who she has not seen for some time. Under the guidance of her domineering and much-married Aunt Hortense, she consults bumbling lawyer Egbert Fitzgerald, once a fiancé of her aunt. He arranges for Mimi to spend a night at a seaside hotel in Brightbourne and to be caught flagrante delicto in a staged "adulterous relationship", a purpose for which he hires a professional co-respondent, Rodolfo Tonetti. In an unrelated previous conversation with Guy, Egbert had been impressed when Guy philosophically used the phrase, "Chance is the fool's name for fate". Without Guy's knowledge and without intending any connection, Egbert gives Mimi the expression as a code phrase to identify her co-respondent.

Accompanying his friend Egbert to the hotel, the besotted and unaware Guy encounters Mimi, who has warmed up to him, and admits that she attempted to contact the phone number that he gave her. He sings Cole Porter's "Night and Day" to her, and they fall under a spell while dancing together. Wanting to impress Mimi, Guy waxes philosophical, inadvertently using the code phrase that Egbert has given Mimi to identify the co-respondent. Appalled, Mimi mistakes him for the co-respondent who she has been expecting, considering him not much more than a gigolo.