Rain

As thematically ballsy as Eastern Front was technically groundbreaking, Milestones' wonderfully dark and lurid Rain takes its place among the trifecta of really fucking good Maugham-adaptations, along with Wylers' The Letter and Hitchcocks' underrated The Secret Agent. It's not the most outrageous pre-code movie, but it's certainly the most subversive. And the horniest.

A somewhat misleading summary here...

84.50

Sound remake of Sadie Thompson (1928). Here we have Joan Crawford as the loose woman and it's Walter Huston as the religious man. Crawford looks a bit too animated at first, but she soon finds her comfort zone and thats when the war is on. And it's a story that provokes as it twists the religious morals to the extreme and you see it get shoved down Crawford's throat to the point that it's brainwashing. The religious abuse gets so one-dimensional that it becomes bit over the top. Still rewarding!