A Film Canon

If Don't Change Your Husband presents a man whose preoccupation with business prevents him providing adequate gifts, then Why Change Your Wife? turns on a woman (Gloria Swanson) whose preoccupation with intelligence and ethics prevents her recognising them. As a result, her education involves an even greater testament to the transformative power of fashion than occurs in the earlier film, and is condensed to her increasing ability and inclination to look at herself in the mirror that, in the opening scene, she is only capable of registering as the door to her bathroom cupboard. To this end, DeMille suffuses his mise- en-scenes with mirrors and reflective windows - a strategy which simultaneously plays to his taste for internal montage, contributes to the creation of sophisticated observation- networks, and allows for the elaboration of more intimate domestic spaces than occurs in the earlier film, possibly because the more explicit focus on femininity creates a greater voyeuristic imperative. As with that film, cross-editing is identified with emotional detachment, both of which are poetically reified in the telephone, which implicitly provides as much of a threat to healthy marriage as the woman's crimes, while orientalism is similarly used both to signify a modern, relatively exotic model of marriage, as well as a point against which to define its essential continuity with the old model. There's also some of the most elegant depiction of conversation in DeMille's oeuvre to date, allowing for minimal titles whose function is often as much a matter of creating a charming, wry tone as of clarifying content - although this is occasionally offset by a hyperbolic profusion of italics and capitals, as if attempting to fuse drama with instructional and industrial documentary.