Half Marriage

An early RKO talkie built around a then-modern question: what happens when a society girl secretly marries a man her parents would never approve of and has to keep the marriage hidden while living at home? Olive Borden plays the debutante who weds Morgan Farley's penniless architect and then splits her life between his boarding-house room and her family's mansion, dodging a mother's plan to marry her off to a rich suitor. Directed by William J. Cowen and produced by William LeBaron, it is a time capsule of both the transitional sound era and 1920s anxieties about class and working wives. It entered the public domain after its copyright was never renewed.