Right from the start, you know what you're going to get. A well made (amazingly well made for 1930) fast-paced, crazy romance with a subtle sense of humour. Possibly it's Nancy Carroll's best film?
The first few minutes set the scene: in a stylishly lit hotel telephone exchange, chiseller Ned Sparks is searching, like many others for Hallie, a girl whose talent is to persuade businessmen by her 'favours' to sign any deal. This scene is a symphony seediness with wonderful 1930s accents: Zasu Pitt's a droning midwest descant against Ned Sparks' crazy deadpan Gangsterville. In just those first minutes, you know two things: 1) this is going to be good and 2) this is NOT one of those typically terrible, stagey, static pictures so common in very early talkies. It has a much more modern feel than you might expect from 1930. If you didn't know you might guess that this was made years later.
Then the screen lights up a Hallie, Nancy Carroll appears. It's probably the lighting but it seems like all the light, the life and the energy is coming from Nancy Carroll. For the next hour she glows and completely owns every frame. You can see exactly why these businessmen would be persuaded by her presence to agree to whatever deal she is being paid to promote. It's not just her pretty face, it's her joy, love of life and bubbly personality which makes her so irresistible to men. It's an astonishing performance - she should have won the Oscar instead of Norma Shearer in THE DIVORCEE; she's ten times more believable.
In fact the whole film is ten times more believable than Norma Shearer's film. Well, it is when you're watching it - but don't think about the plot too much. Besides Nancy Carroll, the other reason this is so good is down to its director Edmund Goulding. He actually wrote this (and wrote the music too!) so this was his pet project - he loved this film and put all his skills and efforts into it.
The result is a completely enthralling, naturally acted pot boiler. You don't notice how stupid the plot gets, you don't notice that Hallie's love interest, Phillips Holmes is the most pathetic, feeble-minded drip in the world. That someone so full of life as Hallie could love someone like this is absurd but you'll be so drawn into this that you'll not question it. That's the skill of a good movie: to make the unbelievable believable.
