crickets...

I'm so surprised that no one else has posted on this board!!!

Well, this is a movie I'm going to guess that NO ONE would see nowadays unless they happened to catch it by mistake on TCM! I just watched it on DVD and what an interesting relic it is!! With acting and writing from the Stone Age of films, there is still much to enjoy in this movie.

I'll layout a little introduction by way of a few SPOILERS:

Billy Haines is Billy Grimes, a radio writer and producer who is stuck in an unhappy marriage. His wife refuses to divorce him since he can't afford to support her with alimony, so, she instead prefers to nag poor Billy whenever he has the misfortune of going home. Billy is in love with his co-worker, Laura O'Neil, played by Madge Evans, but they can't move forward with their plans because Billy is stuck in his marriage quagmire. There are two other O'Neil sisters in the story, Sally and Honey, played by Anita Page and Joan Marsh! They really brought out the 30s babes for this one! Honey is new in New York and, one night at a swell party on-board a swanky yacht, is taken in by a cad's boozy promise of marriage and we're left with the very strong implication that she gave herself to him as a wife would to a husband. The cad laughs the whole thing off as being all in an evening's fun and games whilst Honey, now sullied and impure, carries herself around like a disgraced pile of damaged goods afterwards, burdened by the mantle of shame.

Billy eventually loses his job at the radio station and, no longer able to endure her ceaseless tirade of nagging, leaves his wife, promising her as he goes that he will support her. Several weeks pass, Billy doesn't find another job and is about to be kicked out of his crummy room in a SRO hotel when the wife comes looking for him in these shabby lodgings and commences with really getting in his face, nagging him for money. Billy physically brushes her aside, out of the way and, naturally, she falls, hits her head, and dies on the spot. Billy panics and leaves, stopping to see Laura before leaving town. They decide to take it on the lam together and get as far as Miami but sooner or later the law catches up with Billy by way of a double-crossing newspaper editor in New York who promises to help Billy but instead uses Billy's trust in him to whip up the story against him in the media. The whole thing ends with Billy being taken away, up to Sing Sing for three years (manslaughter) and Laura seeing him off in a tearful, and would-be tear-jerking, finish.

In 1932, it would be another two years before the watershed onset of the Breen Office and The Code enforcement, so, we get to see a little racy behavior go unpunished or unaccounted for. If you asked me, I would have instead liked to have seen the cad who de-flowered Honey, and for that matter, that lying snake of a sleazy double-crossing newspaper editor, come to a horrible and bad end and for Billy to have been found not-guilty by some last moment fluke. As it happens, the cad goes merrily on his way, carefree as ever and Billy gets sent up the river to Ossining for three years. Oh well...

Billy Haines was a pretty lightweight actor whose tremendous popularity was on the wane and about to fizzle when this movie was made. A year later, he'd be let go by MGM. He comes across as a bit unbelievable but still likable. Madge Evans could not have been stiffer than if she were carved from a petrified tree trunk. Since they were the romantic leads, they pretty much kill any chance of this ever being taken, even somewhat, seriously. The production values are very primitive, even for 1932, and some of the story events are handled very clumsily when they're not given naive and jejune treatment (I had to chuckle when Billy was instantly a man wanted for murder within minutes of his wife falling and fatally hitting her head, with non-stop announcements on the radio: "Be on the look-out for Billy Grimes, wanted for murdering his wife..." As if such a thing would have happened that way in 1930s New York!)

But, the story goes from dumb and daffy to quite serious to rather dark and, in spite of the two leads, is not a bad yarn. The real delight is Joan Marsh as Honey and Anita Page as Sally!! They are sassy and high-energy and come across very well. All of the supporting roles are sufficiently colorful, from cads to mugs, from captains of industry to well-meaning avuncular types, with a few salty ethnic types and hard-boiled tough guys, as you would expect from a 1930s film. This surely was not a Warner's production. MGM could not even begin to evoke the gritty realism of the Warner's 1930s output. The performance scenes in the radio studio are wonderful - all of scenes of the performances (with wacky live sound effects) are priceless!! I especially liked the machine for applause!

All in all, for a short little 73 minute film, not so bad and very interesting as an historical relic.