What a wonderful movie!

Norma Shearer is magnificent, beautiful and witty and ADORABLE! Basil Rathbone is a charming cad, but not too much of a cad.

The script is crisp, funny, suspenseful and full of shenanigans. A little stagey for modern viewers perhaps, but for fans of the early talkies (the very early talkies, 1929, maybe 1930), it doesn't get a whole lot better than this!

And so much silence! They didn't heighten the mood with music, they used a dark silent house at night to set the mood for a dark silent house at night. This would have gotten boring FAST if they had kept doing it, but it's something I like to see from time to time in early talkies.

Also, the supporting cast is great! I think it's AMAZING how well-written and how well-fleshed-out almost all the characters are, even some of the folks who only have a few lines of dialogue.

I love Norma Shearer, but I'm a little leery of her early talkies. Private Lives is great! And I like parts of A Free Soul and The Divorcee. But the latter two are a little slow and they aren't movies I'm eager to watch more than once.

But The Last of Mrs. Cheyney is a great movie that sheds a little light in just what Hollywood was capable of in 1929. (Even if they didn't make very many movies quite as good at the time.)

Janet! Donkeys!