Payment on Demand

Joyce's husband David comes home one day and says he wants a divorce. She is caught unprepared. Then she learns he is with someone much younger than her. Joyce decides to turn the separation into a holiday and travels alone to the Caribbean. There she runs into Emily, an old acquaintance left embittered by her own divorce. Curtis Bernhardt's film goes back through flashbacks from the beginning of the marriage to the present and does not lay the blame on one side: what Joyce did to push her husband upward is in the telling too. It is counted among the least known and most measured of Bette Davis's works. The telling presents divorce as neither a catastrophe nor a deliverance. Barry Sullivan and Jane Cowl are in the cast.