Any Wife on AllMovie

Tired of making serials and suffering from a back injury sustained in her latest, Pearl White (of The Perils of Pauline fame) signed a deal with producer William Fox to star in a series of society melodramas. Any Wife told the tragic story of Myrtle Hill, a discontented wife who refuses to join her husband (Gilbert Emery) on a business trip, dallying instead with a business assistant (Holmes Herbert). Returning unexpectedly, Hill finds his wife embracing the "other man" and demands a divorce. Declared an unfit mother and losing custody of her only child, Myrtle marries her lover. She misses her former life, however, and the marriage is doomed from the start. Her life continuing in a downward spiral, Myrtle takes the only way out: Jumping to her death from a bridge. But in a typical Hollywood denouement, it was all a bad dream. Myrtle resolves to devote her life to her marriage and agrees to accompany her husband on his business trip. Audiences never accepted Pearl White in melodramas such as this and in 1923 she returned to the serial field a final time before retiring.