There's some good things to say about this but unfortunately there's a lot more bad things to say about it. Visually and technically it's very impressive. Tod Browning invests a great deal of thought into achieving perfect framing, atmospheric lighting and some clever imagery. His style however is so unsuited to this film that the overall effect is awful.
The actual story is absurd. It begins as a crime movie but then evolves into an intense melodrama. Mary Nolan is the star and she plays a cynical, heartless gangster's moll who's tied up with a bank robber. What the story is about is whether her bank robber boyfriend (who's actually a decent guy) can change her into a loving, caring, sweet maternal young lady.... in the space of a couple of days. It's a stupid premise and is so ridiculous that the film loses all its credibility.
Edward G Robinson was a rising star at Universal but he's only the supporting actor in this one. Even though he's not at the top of the bill, he seems to be the only member of the cast doing any proper acting. It is however not those actors' fault - the 'bad acting' is actually deliberate. Apart when E. G. R has a scene the dialogue is glacially slow. The weird slow motion style of delivery feels like the the film keeps freezing. A lot of very early talkies we're terrible - directors hadn't a clue how to make the transition to sound, actors forgot how to move and indeed how to speak but this is not one of those. It's a pretty bad film but not because the team at Universal didn't know what they were doing - no, they just didn't want to make this like a proper film.
Tod Browning, although a little past his prime by now was one of Silents' most stylish directors. He was chosen to deliberately make this picture as much like a silent as a talkie could be. It was made with a sense of nostalgia, an attitude that 'if we must use this new fangled sound nonsense let's make sure it doesn't ruin our art form we've spent so long perfecting.' Sound was considered to be an unwelcome intruder not something which could enrich the experience. The experiment really doesn't work, it makes it seem like no one knew how to produce a talking picture and plays up to that old prejudice that those silent stars couldn't make talkies.
Someone who really suffered was this film's star Mary Nolan. She had been an absolute megastar just a few years earlier but this would be her last film at Universal or indeed any major studio before plummeting into an utterly tragic life of heroin addiction, destitution and an early death. When you see how pretty and full of life she was here, it really is genuinely upsetting. She just didn't get a lucky break and found herself having to act in this painfully un-entertaining nonsense. That said, there were other reasons: she had some major personal problems, she wasn't a great actress and certainly couldn't play a cynical gangster's moll - she comes across as even less convincing than Jean Harlow and that's saying something! It wasn't all her fault though, she was directed by Browning to play it this way. In this picture however unfortunately she is one of the main reasons this comes across as such a poor film.
