Don't Change Your Husband/The Golden Chance
In Don't Change Your Husband, Cecil B. DeMille's first film with Gloria Swanson, Leila Porter (Swanson) tires of her dull nouveau-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 Nanette the maid (Julia Faye), she encourages her now-reformed husband to pursue and remarry her. This edition is digitally mastered from the 35mm preservation negative, tinted according to the original instructions, and features authentic photoplay music performed by the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra. The drama of a woman who should have changed husbands long before she did, The Golden Chance, almost forgotten today, is one of Cecil B. DeMille's superlative early efforts. Against her family's wishes, beautiful and well-bred Mary (Cleo Ridgeley) 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 come at the last minute. This edition is digitally mastered from the 35mm preservation negative, tinted according to the original instructions, and scored with authentic photoplay music compiled and performed by Rodney Sauer.