Engaging pre-Code women-in-the-slammer nonsense, with Stanwyck as a guileless babe in stir for a bank robbery. Lillian Roth helps out loads as a tough fellow inmate (she even sings "If I Could Be With You," to an 8x10 of Joe E. Brown), and Ruth Donnelly, always indispensable in these Warners early talkies, is a sympathetic matron. Other delights include a bullish cigar-smoking lady criminal and Dorothy Burgess as Stanwyck's worst nightmare. But the morality is all over the place, with Stanwyck abetting her fellow bank robbers in a breakout attempt, yet the scriptwriters still demand that she engage our sympathy. We're even supposed to root for her as she falls in and out and in and out of love with Preston Foster, as a crusading Aimee Semple McPherson sort, a relationship that makes no sense at all. This is the type of movie where she shoots her lover and immediately whimpers, "I didn't mean that!" Stanwyck was always an interesting actress, and as she alternately snarls and screams and charms and smiles, she's intensely watchable. But her schizo character doesn't register as a heroine. And Preston Foster doesn't register at all.
Review of Ladies They Talk About
