Plus: Cecil B. DeMille's The Golden Chance

Don't Change Your Husband (1919)
Described in 2004 as "a truly sophisticated comedy" and reviews in 1919 as "a really fine work," Don't Change Your Husband is the second film in Cecil B. DeMille's trilogy of marriage and divorce and the first of his six films with Gloria Swanson.

Leila Porter (Gloria Swanson) tires of her dull noveau-riche husband (Elliot Dexter) who is inattentive, sloppy and an eater of green onions. She trades him for Schuyler Van Sutphen, a suave but two-timing playboy (Lew Cody), but when she learns Van Sutphen is having an affair with the maid (Julia Faye), she encourages her now-reformed husband to remarry her.


The Golden Chance (1916)
The drama of a woman who should have changed husbands long before she did, The Golden Chance (1916), almost forgotten today, is one of Cecil B. DeMille's superlative early efforts.

Against her family's wishes, beautiful and well-bred Mary (Cleo Ridgely) has married Steve Denby (H.B. Carpenter), a criminal lout whose alcoholism has reduced the couple to destitution in a one-room slum apartment. Mary finds work as dressmaker to a society woman (Edythe Chapman) who is organizing a dinner party to help her husband close a business deal with an eligible millionaire (Wallace Reid). Transformed like Cinderella, Mary substitutes for a guest who is unable to attend at the last minute. After a confrontation with Denby, we are left with an ambiguous ending and hope for the inevitable pairing-off.