For a film with a title like this and starring Jean Harlow, no less, one goes in expecting, at the very least, modest amounts of sexiness, craziness, and general, post code envelope pushing. Instead, what we get is a fairly subdued affair. Even the opening title number is depressingly played to an empty house. (I guess that's the point). There are a few William Powell zingers and some May Robeson zingers, as well, and Harlow, as always, does a fine job of channeling innocence misunderstood as prurience. But the whole affair is simply too somber and dull for the talent involved and once Franchot Tone's dissipated playboy conveniently and non believably offs himself so that Powell and Harlow can stay together and you see that the film still has fifteen minutes left you can almost feel 1935 audiences looking at their collective watches, if not getting up to beat the post movie traffic.
A couple scenes do, however, linger in the mind, such as Powell's nervous proposal to a sleeping Harlow and Harlow's uneasy interview with her new, cold fish father in law (wonderfully played by Henry Stephenson). Would that there had been more of them. But when you have burned up ten screenwriters, of which only one took credit, as this movie did, I suppose you should be thankful of anything good that comes out of it. C plus.
PS...Considering that Louis B Mayer, for exploitative reasons, forced Harlow, against her will, to appear in a film that mirrored her real life husband's suicide I am REALLY glad this one lost money.
A couple scenes do, however, linger in the mind, such as Powell's nervous proposal to a sleeping Harlow and Harlow's uneasy interview with her new, cold fish father in law (wonderfully played by Henry Stephenson). Would that there had been more of them. But when you have burned up ten screenwriters, of which only one took credit, as this movie did, I suppose you should be thankful of anything good that comes out of it. C plus.
PS...Considering that Louis B Mayer, for exploitative reasons, forced Harlow, against her will, to appear in a film that mirrored her real life husband's suicide I am REALLY glad this one lost money.