A Bill of Divorcement

Hilary Fairfield comes home one day after fifteen years in an asylum. He had come back from the war shaken, and then he was shut away. Everything at the house has changed. His wife Margaret has just got her divorce through and is about to marry another man. His daughter Sydney is grown and engaged herself. He knows none of it; the house in his head is the old one. Watching her father, Sydney sees something: the same illness may have come down to her. George Cukor directs; seventy minutes, with John Barrymore as Hilary and Katharine Hepburn as Sydney in her first film, adapted from Clemence Dane's play. When the play was written, Britain was arguing over whether insanity should be grounds for divorce.