Barbara Stanwyck (Nan Taylor), Preston Foster (Dave Slade), Lillian Roth (Linda), Lyle Talbot (Don), Dorothy Burgess (Susie), Ruth Donnelly (Noonan), Robert McWade (district attorney), Maude Eburne (Aunt Maggie), Cecil Cunningham (Mrs Arlington), Grace Cunard (Marie), Helen Mann (Blondie), Harold Huber (Lefty), Madame Sul-Te- Wan (Mustard), Louise Carter (Lefty's landlady), Harold Healy (Dutch), DeWitt Jennings (Detective Tracy), Helen Ware (Mrs Johnson, head matron), Louise Emmons (Jessie Jones), John Hyams (bank manager), Ray Turner (bank janitor), Harold Minjir (bank teller), Harry Gribbon (bank guard), Davison Clark (jail chief), Robert Warwick (warden), Helen Dickson (lady with cigar), Mary Gordon (prisoner in visiting room), Isabel Withers (prisoner), Jack Baxley (man seated next to Slade at revival meeting), Harry C. Bradley (little man in corridor at revival meeting), Tom McGuire (Farnum, an official at revival), Ferris Taylor (man on stage at radio broadcast), William Keighley (man getting a shoeshine).
Director: HOWARD BRETHERTON. Version released in USA (and currently broadcast by TCM) partly re-shot by WILLIAM KEIGHLEY. Screenplay: Brown Holmes & William McGrath & Sidney Sutherland. Based on the play Women in Prison by Dorothy Mackaye & Carlton Miles. Photography: John Seitz. Film editor: Basil Wrangell. Art director: Esdras Hartley. Costumes designed by Orry-Kelly. Songs: "If I Could Be With You" (Roth) by James P. Johnson (music) and Henry Creamer (lyrics); "St Louis Blues" (sung off-camera by Etta Moten) by W.C. Handy; "Are You Lonesome Tonight?" by Roy Turk and Lou Handman. Music director: Leo F. Forbstein, conducting The Vitaphone Orchestra. Music: Cliff Hess, Stills: Homer Van Pelt. Assistant director: Ben Silvey. Sound recording: Charles Althouse. Producer: Raymond Griffith. A Warner Bros. Picture.
Not copyright. Worldwide release through Warner Brothers Pictures, Inc. U.S. release: 25 February 1933. New York opening at both the Capitol and Loew's Metropolitan: 24 February 1933. U.K. release: 15 July 1933. 69 minutes
SYNOPSIS: Evangelistic reformer falls in love with a gun moll from his old home town.
NOTES: Harold Huber does not appear in the Howard Bretherton version released in England (and presumably also in Australia). In the Bretherton movie, Lyle Talbot visits Stanwyck in prison. In the Keighley version, Talbot was instead substituted for one of the escapees and was, by clever intercutting with the Bretherton footage, killed. In the Bretherton version, the two men were merely caught. This does give the heroine a better reason to shoot Slade and makes her action more believable.
COMMENT: Unless you're aware that Keighley directed part or all of several key scenes, the work of the two directors is hard to pin down. The Lillian Roth footage is obviously Bretherton's work, but the impressive scenes with Ruth Donnelly and her white cockatoo were probably also his.
And what about the three very striking encounters between Stanwyck and DeWitt Jennings in which the sparks fly (even under what seems to be a civil surface)? And how about the Preston Foster revival material with its sweeping crowd shots?
Yes, if you can disregard the somewhat incredible story-line (easy enough to do while the quick-paced movie is actually running) and its remarkable picture of a women's jail (allegedly San Quentin, according to some reviewers), you can accept (and enjoy) the theatricality of the milieu without question. On this basis, "Ladies They Talk About" emerges as a most fascinating movie with acerbic portraits all down the line, particularly from Stanwyck's chiseling, chip-on-the-shoulder heroine, Foster's self-first reformer, Dorothy Burgess's numbingly accurate study of a religious fanatic and Robert McWade's opportunistic district attorney.
It's also good to see Lillian Roth in a sizable role (and given a chance to sing too).
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