This is a long sprawling soap about the life of a rather uninteresting girl called Millie. She's an independently minded girl which in the mind of the film's writers means that she will have to pay for that!
Although the film spans twenty years of Millie's life from innocent young thing to a being just a damaged shadow of life, you never really get to know who she is. The writing is much too shallow to understand any character development. It pretends to be a woman's film; a film championing women's struggle against a world ruled by men but its subplot seems to portray the complete opposite theme. The story has no positive message, it has a very pessimistic outlook on life. It exists seemingly just to allow us, the viewer to take some sort of punitive delight in making poor, sweet Helen Twelvetrees suffer for what the writers would like us to imagine is her sinful and amoral life. What is baffling is that her life is neither sinful not amoral, indeed the whole plot is how the men in her life have caused all her problems....but had she expected less from life....
The writer, Harvard educated Donald Henderson Clarke's stock in trade were salacious, racy novels about ladies of easy virtue. With this, he has tried to redress the balance by taking a woman's point of view but his traits are still there. Millie's friends, a couple of 'ladies of the night' played particularly unconvincingly by Joan Blondell and Lilyan Tashman are there just to prove that in the world beyond Clarke's ivory tower, these male fantasies do exist - there's no explanation why they end up in this predicament, they just fit into an unfortunate view the world of the late 1920s had about people from different backgrounds. Joan Blondell incidentally only has a very small supporting role, she had not yet developed into the sassy, sexy dame character we all love (well I do!), in fact, as it pains me to say, she's pretty awful in this. Terrible acting however is a common trait of this whole picture - especially the men - except for Frank McHugh who is always great and adds some much needed fun to this otherwise gloomy dirge. Even Helen Twelvetrees who is usually ok (and was brilliant in HER MAN) is a little 'school play' at times. Just because this was filmed in 1930 is no excuse for the poor direction and poor acting and poor story development. There were plenty of superb films made that year year but there were however much more which were like this.
Although its a pretty poor picture, it's almost interesting to get a feel of the prejudices and injustices of this age. Even a film purporting to put over a female point of view gets bogged down in the ingrained judgemental misogyny of the age. There are dozens of early 1930s women's films so much better than this with actual stories and believable dialogue, this is essentially just a pointless daytime soap.
Although the film spans twenty years of Millie's life from innocent young thing to a being just a damaged shadow of life, you never really get to know who she is. The writing is much too shallow to understand any character development. It pretends to be a woman's film; a film championing women's struggle against a world ruled by men but its subplot seems to portray the complete opposite theme. The story has no positive message, it has a very pessimistic outlook on life. It exists seemingly just to allow us, the viewer to take some sort of punitive delight in making poor, sweet Helen Twelvetrees suffer for what the writers would like us to imagine is her sinful and amoral life. What is baffling is that her life is neither sinful not amoral, indeed the whole plot is how the men in her life have caused all her problems....but had she expected less from life....
The writer, Harvard educated Donald Henderson Clarke's stock in trade were salacious, racy novels about ladies of easy virtue. With this, he has tried to redress the balance by taking a woman's point of view but his traits are still there. Millie's friends, a couple of 'ladies of the night' played particularly unconvincingly by Joan Blondell and Lilyan Tashman are there just to prove that in the world beyond Clarke's ivory tower, these male fantasies do exist - there's no explanation why they end up in this predicament, they just fit into an unfortunate view the world of the late 1920s had about people from different backgrounds. Joan Blondell incidentally only has a very small supporting role, she had not yet developed into the sassy, sexy dame character we all love (well I do!), in fact, as it pains me to say, she's pretty awful in this. Terrible acting however is a common trait of this whole picture - especially the men - except for Frank McHugh who is always great and adds some much needed fun to this otherwise gloomy dirge. Even Helen Twelvetrees who is usually ok (and was brilliant in HER MAN) is a little 'school play' at times. Just because this was filmed in 1930 is no excuse for the poor direction and poor acting and poor story development. There were plenty of superb films made that year year but there were however much more which were like this.
Although its a pretty poor picture, it's almost interesting to get a feel of the prejudices and injustices of this age. Even a film purporting to put over a female point of view gets bogged down in the ingrained judgemental misogyny of the age. There are dozens of early 1930s women's films so much better than this with actual stories and believable dialogue, this is essentially just a pointless daytime soap.