Self Made Lady (1932) User Reviews

Creaky Quota Qicky

[malcolmgsw · 5/10 · 10 May 2014]

This quota quickie was made by George King at Walton Studios for release by United Artists.It is very poorly directed and at times it is difficult to know exactly what is happening.Particularly in the fight scene where it would appear that Louis Hayward kills Heather Angel's dad with one punch.STill she doesn't hold it against him.However she is subsequently blackmailed by an onlooker who witnessed the incident.So fortunately for her another friend takes care of the blackmailer so that Angel can marry Hayward,who wants to go into research rather than Harley Street.The studio looks very small and so we have the usual grouping of people together.One of the type of films that brought Quota Quickies such a bad name.

Self Made Pretty Dreadful!

[JohnHowardReid · 4/10 · 6 August 2012]

Although it was actually produced on a fair to middling budget, this is the sort of movie that gives British quota quickies such a really bad (and often richly deserved) name. Admittedly, Heather Angel, in the main role of the girl who rises from gutter-snipe to talk-of-the-town fashion designer, does give the part a really good try. Both her Cockney and Mayfair accents are faultless. Henry Wilcoxon, also cast well against type (in fact you would be hard put to recognize him if he were not so tall) also impresses, while Louis Hayward does his best to make an impression as a potential lover who spends most of the movie on the sidelines. Well, so far, so reasonably good. But the real killer of the movie is the gentleman who has his name in such enormous type in the credit titles, namely George King. Mr King is a firm exponent of that school of lazy "B"-picture directing that could be described as the plonk the camera down and nail it to the floor while the players give us a six-minute take. This would be tolerable if the plot made an atom of sense, but it doesn't. Themes are introduced and then abruptly discarded. For a while there, the plot twists itself into knots that make it often seem as if Louis Hayward is not going to return. He does, of course, but that fact in itself does give the movie a teensie-weensie bit of suspense anyway. And Heather Angel does impress -- no doubt about that!

No matter her name, she's no angel.

[mark.waltz · 3/10 · 21 February 2024]

No one can fault Heather Angel's desire to rise above her station, but this variation of Eliza Doolittle isn't exactly subtle about it. Maybe Eliza wouldn't mind not seeing her father ever again, but I don't think she wished him harm. Angel's character of Sookey (her surname) goes from cockney working class to well spoken business woman without the flickering of the movie screen, is reunited with the man who accidentally killed her father, and eventually learns that her father is somebody completely different from her tactless mother (Amy Veness).

A hot mess of a movie, and I'm sure that the missing nine minutes don't explain much. Henry Wilcoxin (the one person she grew up with whom she remains close), Ronald Ritchie (a vicious blackmailer) and Louis Hayward (the nobleman who accidentally killed the man she thought who was her father) are among the cast, with A. Bromley Davenport as the duke who accepts her immediately as his daughter, this is deliciously bad.

The most hoary of Gainsborough melodramas can't top all of the absurdities of this one, but Angel's fun to watch wringing her hands over each situation she encounters. The characters are all so one dimensional that they seem like something out of some ancient deservedly forgotten play, popularly called "barnstormers", and I'm surprised that Tod Slaughter didn't pop up in this, especially considering that the director George King later guided many of his outlandish melodramas. It's a shame that this doesn't have the cult following of those because it's nearly as cheesy.