Die Spielerin

McCrea likely sold the tickets to an audience that wanted to see him matched with Babs. The problem is he had remarkable chemistry with Claire Dodd and Mayo did not give Stanwyck equalizing support in the glamour department. Here Babs takes a chance on love rather than the kind of locked in inevitability she had with Fred MacMurray. This gamble is the moral of the story but it takes a lot of plot twists to work and requires eliminating Mr. Chemistry himself, Pat O'Brien. Anything with O'Brien is worth watching, but it's hard to watch him lose Stanwyck when what they would do in a romance remained unexplored. Also letting McCrea and Dodd succeed would have been fun. But this was about a long shot paying off and it does in the final scenes which provide the excellent acting promised in the star billing.