Lady with a Past

What a surprising delight this film is. Constance Bennett plays a rich wallflower who just can't get the guys in her set interested. She's also has a crush on boozy and shallow David Manners. One night when he is drunk he asks her to marry him and meet him on a boat to Europe the next morning. Of course he sobers up, and she ends up going alone.

In Paris Bennett meets a charming and broke guy (Ben Lyon)whom she hires as her "gigolo" so that he can show her around and meet people. Lyon hits on the idea of making up stories about her "past" so that men will be interested. They get along great and their plan is wildly successful until a surprising event occurs.

Bennett is quite good underplaying her sympathetic role. Lyon is terrific as the cynical but honest guy. Manners is also good as the callous boozer. Cast also includes Nella Walker, Albert Conti, Astrid Allwyn, Don Alvarado, Blanche Frederici, Bruce Cabot, and Merna Kennedy.

The ending is quite a surprise.

This is a charming, subtle little pre-code in which everything is implied and little actually shown.

Constance Bennet is a good girl from a good New York family and no one finds her interesting. In Paris she finds Ben Lyon, an indigent American who bums a beer from her. She hires him as a gigolo and he shows her how to be fascinating to men, using frequent kicks to the shin to encourage her education.

Lyon is particularly good in his fast-talking role and Miss Bennet is at her most charming. The two have real chemistry together and Edward Griffith directs with a gracefully moving camera under the control of the under-rated Hal Mohr. All of these combine to produce a comedy that is knowing without being cynical.

... that premise being that Constance Bennett as Venice Muir cannot attract a man at all. Constance isn't some plainly dressed and drably made-up wallflower that physically transforms, which is the plot you'd expect. From scene one she is the glamorous looking woman she usually plays, yet we are to believe that because she wants to discuss the books she's read that men would chew through wood to get out of being in the same room with her? With her looks and bearing she should reasonably expect to recite the dictionary and yet be followed by suitors - men simply aren't that deep.

David Manners proposes marriage to Venice when drunk, slinks away when sober, and leaves Venice wondering what she'll have to do to change her luck with men. Her solution - hire someone (Ben Lyon) to be her "boyfriend" and tell tales about her lack of virtue and her exciting nature that in turn should attract some actual suitors. These things never work out as planned - I'll let you watch and see what happens.

Audiences of 1932 must have been surprised to see la Bennett play an unassertive society girl who wants to be married, but who, despite her stunning looks and pots of money, is shunned by the bachelors. Although sister Joan would have been more believable in the role of Miss Unpopularity, the story gets interesting when our tongue-tied caterpillar goes to Paris and is transformed by fun loving Ben Lyon into a social butterfly with a half dozen suitors fluttering around her, including the shallow boy from back home. And now that she can pick and choose, who do you think she ends up with at the finale? No matter. This is a pleasant little film and it's fun to watch Bennett sip champagne cocktails and flirt with fortune hunters in one stunning costume after another. No wonder her fans loved her.

A woman as beautiful, rich and well-read as Constance Bennett's character can't get any men to pay attention to her???

If true, she should have dumped her social circle and found a new one.

From the audience's perspective, who was sitting around in The Depression, eating soup made of unwashed socks, thinking, ''What I really want to see this Saturday for my 5c is a rich, beautiful, smart woman mope around because the dopey men around her don't appreciate her charms."

And then to escape to Paris to work up a reputation as a sk2nk?

Puh-lease.

It's insidious garbage like this that taught a generation or more of smart women to hide their brains and flaunt their inner floozy to attract a worthless man.

Now THAT'S depressing.