User reviews

We can't really expect low-budget pre-code melodramas to be 'great films'. They're automatically of historical interest because of the themes they dare to explore and which were banished from the screen in 1934. If you have decent actors, and interesting enough plot and some "daring" dialog many of these films can be enjoyable, if ultimately disposable. THE LADY REFUSES is a dead serious entry and thanks to Gilbert Emery and star Betty Compson it works in its own terms. Compson does well as a "woman of the street" who happens upon a sympathetic, lonely, older rich man who takes her under his wing. She's smart and perceptive about his situation: a beloved son has no time for his father. When Emery enlists attractive Compson to help lure the son away from a "bad woman", things get complicated. It doesn't all go as you'd expect. Among the better of the lesser-known pre-code movies now back in circulation, it's no masterpiece but Emery and Compson raise it a bit above the average.

I agree with the other reviewers: This isn't a great movie because it is too stage bound, the plot is far-fetched, the London setting unconvincing (why not New York?), and some of the acting is wooden or uneven. However, John Darrow is convincing as a talented young man a little too enslaved by his passions, and he is sexually alive and compelling. Betty Compson is great - hers is the performance that make this and so many other pre-Production Code movies worthwhile. She has no shame about who she is (nor has Margaret Livingston, who appears to have stepped out of Valley of the Dolls), and her last speech earns the movie a 7 in my book. She is completely liberated, though she knows how to and does pay lip-service to conventional morality. It is this combination, the lip-service combined with the complete independence, that makes this pre-Production Code movie (among many) so radical. Her final scene eloquently gives the lie to conventional morality and left me agape. No need for the 1960s-lib genre with movies like this.

This film isn't particularly outstanding in so many ways. Some of the acting and plot elements were rather pedestrian (at best) and the plot is very hard to believe, but despite all this I actually enjoyed the film more than my score of 6 might indicate. That's because this is a "Pre-Code" film (actually, this term should be "Early-Code") and I find these films VERY entertaining relics from our past. The Hays Office was created in the 1920s to enforce morality and decency in the film industry, but it was still in its early days and studios routinely ignored it until the stronger "Production Code" was adopted in 1935. Up until then, films were often amazingly risqué and adult--even by today's standards. A few examples of the things that led to the Hays Office being created and strengthened were:

--The 1920s version of BEN HUR, in which there was quite a bit of nudity and violence--and this was a Biblical Epic!

--The film PARACHUTE JUMPER includes a scene where Frank McHugh is hitchhiking. When a car passes without stopping, his thumb instantly becomes a middle-finger!

--In BIRD OF PARADISE, TARZAN THE APE MAN and THE BARBARIAN, there were some very explicit bathing scenes in which you see a lot of Delores Del Rio, Maureen O'Sullivan and Myrna Loy!

While THE LADY REFUSES doesn't include nudity, it is definitely a "Pre-Code"-style film because of the very adult themes. The leading lady (Betty Compson) plays a prostitute "with a heart of gold" who is hired by a man to seduce away his son from a "gold-digger"! And, later both the son AND father fall for this prostitute and want to marry her! Oddly, however, the words 'prostitute', 'hooker' nor any of the other slang terms for the profession are used in the film--though it's very clear that this is Ms. Compson's job. In addition to this adult aspect of the film, the son twice spends the night in Ms. Compson's bed and everyone in the film THINKS that they were fornicating (though they weren't). Such innuendo NEVER would have been tolerated just a few years later.

Now despite all these sleazy elements, the movie itself is pretty entertaining and well-made--and definitely kept my interest. Ms. Compson was a dandy actress in the film and it's sad her career as a talking picture leading lady slowly fizzled. As for John Darrow and Gilbert Emery, they both were pretty poor at times--having some trouble with their lines and occasionally over or under-acting. It wasn't bad enough to severely hinder the film, but it was noticeable if you were paying close attention.

The bottom line is that for fans of the "Pre-Code" films or film buffs, this is a MUST-SEE film. For most others, it's a time-passer or eminently one you can skip.

I saw this film on YouTube and was rather impressed by it. The adult themes of the interesting story held my attention, but what really sold me was, to me, the always-good Betty Compson, an actress whose heyday was in the silent films, and though she couldn't sing or dance, became quite popular in the early talkie days by virtue of the fact that she not only had a fine speaking voice, but she could really act. She's just fine playing the street girl with the heart-of-gold here, and the story and settings are good as well. If I can fault the production, it's in the fact that, despite being set in London, no one (save for Daphne Pollard) speaks with anything like a British accent. I chalk this up to it's "early talkie" status and the fact that, perhaps in those days, the producers weren't sure that a genuine British accent would go over with a "Yank" audience. The theme music over the opening and closing credits is "My Dream Memory", from Betty's 1929 picture, Street Girl. In that picture, Betty did her own playing on the violin of that song.

Sad morally questionable British drama/romance about a father who hires a new prostitute to lure his son away from a gold digger...but in the process falls in love with her himself! Of course the lady in question starts bringing up the "code among gentleman" and how he would always wonder or question her.

Wonderful early 30's clothing and set. I learned that cocktails and ice were an American thing.

If you are ok with melodrama this might be for you.

"Beds aren't respectable, especially this bed, wicked little spider."

"Don't worry, don't blush, I once studied to be a nurse."

Gilbert Emery, as a patrician English peer, Sir Gerald Courtney, dominates this film as he tries to bring his rakehell son Russell (John Darrow) closer to him through a secret strategem involving June (Betty Compson), an economically distressed young woman. To regain Russell's affection, Sir Gerald offers June, whom he has rescued from incipient prostitution, one thousand pounds in this London-based work, for her efforts in dissuading his wayward son from an alliance with a golddigger played by Margaret Livingston. Compson, an accomplished actress during the silent era, does her best to portray a worldly woman given an unexpected beneficence by fate, but she is hampered by a script which is clumsily written with a good deal of dialogue bordering upon gaucherie. After escaping from a pair of zealous bobbies, with assistance from Sir Gerald, June is established by him into an apartment building shared with the unwitting Russell, and is graced as well with a lavish wardrobe at a couturiere's, this latter being probably the picture's most defined moment. June's good works for the salving of Russell are dealt with in some detail, and are obviously largely appreciated by Sir Gerald, but her relationships with both father and son are skimpily sketched and emotional liaisons appear to be rather abruptly developed and severed. Veteran director George Archainbaud seems to have scant vision for whatever niceties the weak scenario might bring, and his handling of the cast and storyline are perfunctory with too many scenes marked by absence of sense; fortunately, the editing is very efficient. Although this affair begins and ends with a tendency towards placing atmosphere above plot, the last unfortunately mars the work; some fine acting turns are somewhat redemptive, particularly those by the always polished Emery and by Halliwell Hobbes as the Courtney family barrister.

This is another Compson story that does not avoid the scandalous. While the Code would not want supposedly middle class moral families exposed to a lower class prostitution story, there is nothing in the plot that strays from praising wealth and condemning immorality. Veblen's conspicuous consumption is the reason to watch. In the absence of strict censorship, high fashion provides cover for quasi-nudity. This not so early talkie has inconveniences like camera noise, bad dialog and incoherent acting. But concerning the looks of apartments, night clubs, the sounds of jazz, fashions, beauty, dark lighting, noisy editing, a blurry camera this is fairly inimitable. To show prostitution as an economic choice was still normal in 1931.

Talky early talkie can't rise above its theatrical roots. Betty Compson is far too old (36 when this movie was released) and American to pass herself off as a Londoner fallen on bad times who can be hired to seduce rakehell John Darrow (who seems to know better than to attempt an English accent). Gilbert Emery is best in a stiff-upper-lip performance enhanced by his remarkable vocal and physical similarity to Stephen Fry. But this tale of a woman saved from the London streets so she can save the son from making the wrong choice is marred by blurry details, as if most of the story has taken place out of frame. What story remains moves slowly, and holds tight to its stereotypes of upper classes, comic butlers, loose women, and sneering foreigners. For devotees of early talkies only.

Sir Gerald Courtney (Gilbert Emery) is worried that his hard-partying son Russell (John Darrow) has been trapped by gold-digging Berthine Waller (Margaret Livingston). He recruits desperate and poor June (Betty Compson) to block the gold-digging hussie and he's willing to pay a large sum.

The father spends a lot of time with June at the start and ends up building all the chemistry. The problem with the 'courtship' is that she's initially faking it. It's not real chemistry. While the premise is interesting, it struggles to generate romantic heat for a long time. Eventually, she shows her true colors when she's alone and that turns things around.

Betty Compson shines in this woman's story of a prim British Lord who rescues a poor woman from the cops, and hires her to save his son, who has drifted away from a career in architecture and into the arms of a scheming gold-digger with a violent Lithuanian pimp. Complications ensue. The "Britishness" of the setting is a bit off, as some of the actors fail to achieve the proper accents, but the rooms in the home of the landed gentry are magnificently over-the-top, as are the apartments of the wealthy, and the glimpse inside a fancy couture shop. These sets present a smashingly florid mash-up of English Manor, Frenchified beaux-arts, and geometric art deco that would fall out of favour shortly, but was the height of luxury at the time.

This film flirts with ideas it never names, and although Compson flings herself between virtuous and tough-as-nails, the actual defining moment comes when diminutive Daphne Pollard, as a landlady, bursts into song while scrubbing the floors. The song she sings in her warbling Australian-Cockney voice is the chorus to "She Was Poor But She Was Honest," a British musical hall favourite that may have begun life as a genuinely tragic Victorian lament, but which by World War I had become a burlesque filled with outrageous verses declaimed with mock portentousness.

It's the same the whole world over It's the poor what gets the blame It's the rich what get the pleasure Ain't it all a blooming shame?

Look up Elsa Lanchester's version on You Tube and listen closely to the lyrics.

There are countless verses, but these two, which appear in many versions, form an actual gloss on the plot:

She was poor but she was honest, Victim of the squire's whim; First 'e loved 'er, then 'e left 'er And she lost 'er name through 'im.

Then she ran away to London For to 'ide 'er grief and shame; But she met another squire And she lost 'er name again.

I wonder if Daphne Pollard improvised the singing of that song or if it was really in the script. Either way, it certainly fits.

"The Lady Refuses" is in itself a good title. It indicates a woman has taken control of her own life and is not going to be pressured into anything. So often in the prewar movies we find that women never refuse, especially when it comes to marriage. I'd put "The Lady Refuses" on par with "Millie" for movies of that era starring an independent woman.

Our Lady in this flick is June (Betty Compson) and it's not marriage that she refuses. She was on the streets of England, on a rainy night, trying to get away from police when Sir Gerald Courtney (Gilbert Emery) opened his door for her. The indications were that she was a prostitute, but that word would never be uttered on screen in the 30's. They just use every silly innuendo to hint at a woman being a prostitute. Words like sex, or even euphimisms for sex, were never spoken, so sex for money was definitely out of the question.

So how could they indicate her profession? She's a common girl (not rich), walking on the rainy streets late at night, unescorted, and the police recognized her as a "new girl." The police, of course, would never say why they were after her, they just stammered with statements like "we thought she was a..." and the like.

Then you have June who told Gerald, "You see, this is my first night at that sort of thing... I was broke and I decided it was either that or the bridge."

Gerald followed with, "And just tonight you decided to put yourself...uhh... let us say... on the market?"

"I'm afraid I have," was June's reply.

June was a bit of a godsend for Sir Gerald. At the time his son was being seduced by an unscrupulous woman who was preventing him from fulfilling his goal of becoming an architect. Gerald offered June 1000 pounds ($5000) to woo his son, Russell (John Darrow), away from his current fling, Berthine Waller (Margaret Livingston).

June took the job and was wonderful at it so the expected happened: Russell fell in love with June, but June was in love with Gerald who was also in love with June. What a tangled web we weave. The web got even more entangled when June let Russell know that she was hired to "accompany" him. Russell thought he had something real only to find out that June was a professional. We'd see something similar decades later in the movie "True Romance," but in that movie Christian Slater and Patricia Arquette (the prostitute) fell in love with no secrets.

What's likable about this movie is that June held her own with the two men. She knew what she was and what she wasn't. Gerald, in particular, knew what she was, but she wasn't going to let Gerald bring her down. It was a rather unconventional love story for the times, but I think it was done better than similar love stories done later (I'm looking at you "Pretty Woman" and "True Romance").

If romantic triangles or quadrangles are your thing, you might enjoy this drawing-room flick. Out of the goodness of his heart, upper class Sir Gerald rescues winsome June from life as a streetwalker. Thus she gains entry into his ritzy mansion. Trouble is he then hires her to win his wastrel son Russell from clutches of gold-digger Berthine. This results in a tangle of conflicting relationships that have no obvious solution.

In days past, this would have been called a woman's picture. Certainly the flick's dominated by talk-talk, interior decor, and thwarted desires. The plot, however, picks up in the last ten-minutes, with a rather surprise ending. Note too how the script shies away from using any synonym for "prostitute", rather surprising for a pre-Code production.

Anyway, as the spunky young June, Compson carries the show, though pairing her with the aging and zombified Sir Gerald remains a stretch. And get a load of Edgar Norton as the officious man-servant Dobbs; he's enough to re-think the whole idea of household help. Except for the memorable last shot, there's nothing special here, especially for impatient guys waiting for Tom Mix and his six-guns.

Gilbert Emery hires destitute Betty Compson to get his son, John Darrow, away from bad woman Margaret Livingston. She does. In the process, both men fall in love with her, and she with Emery.

It's a nicely twisted plot, and the visuals of this movie are very nicely handled by DP Leo Tover. However, the dialogue direction is awful, with most of the performers sounding like first-time stage performers. Darrow occasionally does better, and a subplot with Miss Livingston and Lebedeff is better handled, but the voicework was often annoying.

Miss Compson started out in show business as a violinist. By the late silent era, she was a major star, doing some of her best work for von Sternberg. She continued to appear in increasingly small roles in ever-more obscure pictures before retiring in 1948. She died in 1974 at the age of 77.

In "Roman Laughter," Prof. Erich Segal offered a discussion of ancient farce, in which the father and son are in dispute over the virtue of a young woman. He then illustrated his point by taking this farce formula seriously, thus crafting the tragic smash hit novel and movie, "Love Story" (1970). His clever perspective was not original; "The Lady Refuses" was there 39 years earlier in pre-code Hollywood. Prior to their liberation, young women often had to make the practical decision of giving themselves to men. June (Betty Compson) walks through the foggy streets of London, considering her prospects, when she arouses the suspicions of two officers. Fearing arrest, she knocks on the door of a wealthy man who admits her. He offers her supper and a thousand pounds if she will lure his son away from a loose woman. The contest between father and son about this woman's character (and their feelings for her) can only be resolved by the audience.

The tendency amongst early US talkies to have British settings where actors talked "English" (through anxiety about the comprehensibility of "American") was a great boon for all the English actors hanging around Hollywood but it produced some bizarre results. See also the improbable cockney criminal who leads a young Cagney astray in that wonderful film of the same year, The Public Enemy. Cagney, of course, was the living proof that one did not have to speak "English" or enunciate carefully (like his little mum in the same film) but it was while before the penny dropped with the ever-fearful US studios.

In this film, set in London (and seemingly genuinely filmed there at least in part), an extremely British gentleman has a son who for some inexplicable reason has grown up to be a singularly unpleasant, ungentlemanly, fat-headed American of whom he is inordinately fond for no possible reason that one can imagine. Happening by chance upon a somewhat destitute, worse-for-wear American girl (of whom there were doubtless many walking and working the streets of London at the time), he employs her to wean his odious offspring from a lifestyle that seems more stupid than wicked and which is seemingly lived amongst an entire colony of Americans (plus one villainous Russian) that seems mysteriously to have installed itself in London. The woman (no chicken), to her credit, sensibly and unsurprisingly falls for the charming father rather than the gruesome son...but she would really have been a more suitable bride for the butler. Unfortunately this sensible resolution seems to occur to no one.....

The film is almost as much nonsense as is all the rubbish talked about "pre-code" US films. Censorship existed in the US industry well before the Hays code and Hays had devised his code in the late twenties although it was true that it was only patchily enforced before about 1932 but the difference this made was really very slight. What changed rather more were social attitudes in the US, which became steadily more conservative and which resulted in much greater self-censorship. The whole "Hays" system was in fact a process of self-censorship and was of course always in the service of the industry. So the censorship that held sway between the thirties and the fifties (when it all started to fall apart) was really just a conspiracy between increasingly risk-avoiding studios and an increasingly conservative cinema-going public.

But the application of that system was never anything but patchy and, even forgetting the burgeoning number of B-films and exploitation films that completely bypassed Hays and the mainstream circuit, the difference between "pre-code" and "post-code" that so many people like to see is really very largely in their own imagination. Just think for a moment of "post-code" films like Design for Living or Nothing Sacred or Detour and compare them with this supposedly "pre-code" load of twaddle and you will easily appreciate the point.....

The most celebrated literary example of the good-hearted prostitute v hypocrisy was Somerset Maugham's story Sadie Thompson and this was filmed in 1928 but again in 1932 (as Rain) and again in 1946 with some variation and an all black cast by Spencer Williams (as Dirty Gertie from Harlem U.S.A.). Meanwhile it was turned into a Broadway musical (1944-45), parodied in the perfectly awful 1949 film Love Happy and then films in its turn by Curtis Bernhardt in 1952.

Archainbaud was something of a hack but he was not incompetent. The Silver Horde the previous year, a sort of latter-day Klondike western based on a Rex ("The Spoilers") Beach novel, contains some excellent documentary-style footage of the salmon fisheries/canneries although I suspect this may owe a bit to the 1920 film of the same novel by Frank Lloyd (lost?). The earlier film also contains a much more believable and effective portrait of "that type of girl" (excellently played by Evelyn Brent).

With respect to the gent from Sacramento, I think it must be Stephen Fry's performances that are "enhanced" by a similarity to Gilbert Emery rather than the other way round.