Marilyn Parker decides not to accompany her husband Rex on his business trip to Europe when she receives a surprise visit from her mother. Hoping to do some shopping and take in plays for the three months while Rex is gone, Marilyn examines an apartment in town, which has just been vacated by a woman, Peggy Burns, who left unexpectedly for Europe. When she sees her husband’s photograph there, Marilyn realizes she is in the “love nest” that Rex provides for his mistress. Unable to understand the reason Rex took a mistress, Marilyn decides to take the apartment, under an assumed name, so that she can meet Peggy’s friends and learn what the life of a mistress is like. After picking up some pointers on how mistresses hold their men, Marilyn attends a party given by one of Peggy’s admirers and meets Westerner Boyce Cameron, who drunkenly steals a kiss from her. She slaps him and he apologizes, and after they go together to a nightclub and she gets drunk, he takes her to her apartment and has her maid September put her to bed. The next day, Boyce lectures her for throwing away her looks and charm on the life she is leading, and he urges her to give up the man who pays for the apartment. During the following days, he tries to “reform” her and ends up falling in love with her. She is affected by him also, but after she hears talk of Rex and Peggy in Paris, she cynically tells Boyce that she does not believe in marriage. He stays away for three days, and not knowing if she will ever see him again, she tells her mother that she wants to marry him. When he does visit, he says that he cannot live without her and, to her dismay, offers her an apartment and his checkbook. Marilyn moves out in disgust, and Boyce hires a detective to find her, but has no luck. When Rex returns home, Marilyn plans to leave him, but when she learns that he is broke, she decides to remain and help out with property that her father left her. Boyce attends a party for Rex and apologizes to Marilyn, unaware of her real identity. When he proposes to her, she confesses that she is already married, and he angrily accuses her of making a fool out of him. Rex learns from a friend that Marilyn and Boyce have been seen together while he was away and accuses her of having an affair. Marilyn then finds him with Peggy at the apartment, and after explaining the reason she took the apartment, she says that she has learned that she did not fail in their marriage, and that the institution of marriage is not a failure, but that some of the people in it, like Rex, are failures. After Marilyn leaves, Peggy, who is through with Rex because of his financial situation, calls an oilman she knows in Tulsa. Boyce plans to go to Europe, but after September visits and tells him that Marilyn left her husband and that she loves him, he races to the train station, where Marilyn and her mother have just boarded a train bound for California. Boyce gets Marilyn’s attention through the train’s window as the train is leaving and, in pantomime, asks if he can follow. She agrees and blows a kiss to Boyce, who plans to take the next train. More on Wikipedia or Mubi
Watch Good Sport (1931)
