Startlingly uncompromising (until the last couple of minutes), this Depression Era drama gazes dispassionately as avaricious Ruth Chatterton & unprincipled husband George Brent put themselves into a financial corner following the tainted advice of financial guru Henry Kolker, her older, just discarded lover. Welcome to high-rise New York cocktail society, where rules allow a sexual barter system for consenting adults, all eager to play the Stock Market for that lux life with comfort paid via mutually agreed upon moral compromise, knowing lies & one more highball. Eye-popping behavior even for Pre-Code 1932! Smoothly directed by William Dieterle in his breakthru year*, Chatterton thrives by moving on to her next lover/provider when her old lover leaves the country just ahead of the 1929 crash or after her broke (and broken) husband sends her down to Bermuda for safekeeping where she immediately warms to a financially stable Australian with a portfolio in sheep. Yikes! As followup, next year, Chatterton, Brent & Dieterle made the better-known feminist drama FEMALE, but this one’s even stronger.
DOUBLE-BILL: *Dieterle, moving up in Hollywood after helming German-language reshoots the previous year, put out six films in 1932, including the excellent quasi-Lubitsch comedy JEWEL ROBBERY.
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