Millie

So pre-code it hurts, this is all about infidelity and promiscuity. I quite love Clarke's story, which follows a unique trajectory, free of the usual precepts, and gives a genuine sense of the time and place's gender politics. Male chauvinism is fully on display, including the sense of entitlement and the obsessive reduction of women to hair color; but women show a great deal of agency and independence. Granted, the ending is forced and Helen Twelvetrees really hams it up in the lead.

Quite watchable melodrama, but the heroine is a bit puzzling--by turns simpering wronged woman, working girl with a heart of god, boozy party girl, and murderess. Helen Twelvetrees' suffering is a bit much, but she's otherwise good. John Halliday is the debonair lothario. And lines like "Suppose we have lunch tomorrow? I'd like to show you my itinerary." "Even apartment numbers don't mean anything in Mr. Rock's life. He simply gets the idea he's necessary on the inside and goes right in."

Millie just can't find a faithful man. All men around her are sexual predators. And when she gets older the men she hangs with want it on with her daughter. And that's the base of this pre-code film. Not a happy movie and it might sound more dramatic then the drama they managed to create out of this story. It's a good one, but it a production they could have gotten a lot more emotion out of with more drama quality actors. Helen Twelvetrees in the lead did okay, but could have brought more.