Second Wife: A Dated Soap with Some Real Teeth

Is this thing worth your time?

If you like old black-and-white dramas that don't bother being subtle, you'll probably enjoy Second Wife. It’s a 1936 B-movie that moves faster than you’d expect. If you’re allergic to 1930s dialogue or plots that rely on people making incredibly questionable parenting choices, you’ll probably want to skip this one.

The whole thing kicks off with Kenneth Carpenter, a widower who decides to introduce his new girlfriend to his son, Junior. It’s a total mess from the start. You can feel the air leave the room the second Virginia walks into that house. The movie does a great job of showing how the ghost of the first wife is basically standing in the corner of every scene. 👻

There’s this one moment where Kenneth accidentally calls Virginia by his dead wife’s name. It’s such a wince-inducing second. You know right then that the marriage is doomed before it even starts. The way the movie handles his guilt feels weirdly raw for a film from that era.

Wait, he sent the kid to Switzerland?

The decision to ship the boy off to boarding school just so the couple can have a quiet year is… well, it’s cold. Really cold. Even the housekeeper seems like she wants to smack some sense into him. It makes you wonder if we’re supposed to like Kenneth at all, or if the movie just assumes we’ll go along with his bad choices because he’s the lead.

Then, the Hindenburg shows up in the plot. Seriously. I had to double-check the year. It’s just tossed in there like a taxi cab. It adds this weird, heavy layer of dread to the whole thing, though it mostly serves to make Kenneth look like a guy who forgets his own pregnant wife exists when he’s stressed out.

• The way Virginia’s suitor, Dave, demands she give up her baby to go to Peru. Who asks that?!
• The kid, Junior, has that specific brand of 1930s child acting that’s either incredibly precocious or just plain eerie.
• The housekeeper is the only person who seems to have a functioning brain.

I couldn't help but compare the domestic friction here to something like The Tender Hour, where the stakes feel personal but the world feels much smaller. This movie tries to play with bigger concepts of loyalty, but it stays grounded in the furniture and the arguments.

Is it a masterpiece? No. It’s a bit clunky, and the ending is wrapped up with a neat little bow that feels a bit too easy given everything that happened. But it’s got enough bite to keep you watching. It’s not just another forgotten relic, even if it feels like one sometimes.

By the time they all embrace at the end, I wasn't entirely sure I believed they’d actually make it work. But hey, that’s life, right? Sometimes you just want a movie to be as messy as a Tuesday night dinner with people you barely know.