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At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Though produced by Warner Bros. at the dawn of the 1930s, this women's prison picture is not much of a social issue drama. Ladies They Talk About (1933) often feels more like a dark comedy than anything else. Barbara Stanwyck plays a tough-talking bank robber who falls for a crusading religious man. He falls for her too, but her past doesn't stop him from having her tossed into the slammer for five years.The plot and love story are mostly bunk. The highlights of the film are the examination of life inside the prison, the way all of these women interact. Unfortunately, the film is marred by unpleasant racial stereotyping and an ending which does not ring true. Stankwyck fans and lovers of pre-code will dig this though.

Long before such heroines as Eleanor Parker and Shirley Knight were referred to "fish" in such prison movies as "Caged" and "House of Women", none other than Barbara Stanwyck got her chance to put on prison frock and bitch-slap someone who crossed her. Her back story is explored before she enters San Quentin's women's detention center, as she is first seen after the opening credits calling the police to warn them about a man running amuck with a knife stabbing people. It's all the set-up for a clever robbery, but she's instantly recognized and put on trial. She attracts the attention of Reverend Preston Foster, an attractive former slum kid she knew years before, but when she confesses, she's sent up the river and secretly vows revenge. In prison, the women inmates look on at her with curiosity to test her, and when she tells off Dorothy Burgess (an obviously hated prisoner obsessed with Foster), she immediately wins the rest of the prisoners over. One in particular, Lillian Roth, becomes her best pal, while even the prison matrons (particularly an Irish accented Ruth Donnelly) come to like her as well.But efforts from Foster to get her to repent go unresponsive until Stanwyck sees her way to use him in order to get an early release. This results in violence concerning her ex-boyfriend Lyle Talbot (one of the bank robbers) and her desire for vengeance increases. Good behavior leads to release, and a possible violent encounter with the sniveling Burgess present as a witness, leading to a conclusion that only a few months later would have been unthinkable in Hollywood films. Stanwyck plays the leading lady with gusto, as ruthless as she was in "Baby Face", yet with that hint of vulnerability under the surface, and it is obviously roles like this that aided her in playing the nefarious roles she started over a decade later with the advent of film noir.The women in prison are a hysterical bunch, with Ms. Roth comically singing "If I Could Be With You" to a portrait of none other than fellow Warner Brothers contractee Joe E. Brown. This is followed by shots of the various women in their cells, including murderous society queen Cecil Cunningham and her Pekingese and a manly cigar smoking prisoner (listed in IMDb credits as a matron) whom Roth had previously warned Stanwyck, "She likes to wrestle". There's a very racist (but funny) moment concerning black prisoner Madame Sul-Te-Wan in a confrontation with Cunningham over "washing her drawers" and Donnelly's presence with a white cockatoo, probably the same one used in a later Warner Brothers movie as the titled character.Of the prisoners, it is Maude Eburne who steals every moment as "Aunt Maggie", an obvious former madam, delivering an innuendo in every line, and protecting Stanwyck after one particularly nasty confrontation with the religiously obsessed Burgess. "The poor girl just fell down", she tells the head matron after Stanwyck punches her lights out, and with every other prisoner laughing their heads off, it's obvious even to the matron that Burgess didn't just fall down and go boom. Down the list of minor players is none other than Mary Gordon who shows that the kindly landlady and Scottish mother of many a film (including Sherlock Holmes' Mrs. Hudson) could be more than just what audiences had seen her do so many times.

Barbara Stanwyck as a beautiful gun moll who helps her gang commit an armed bank robbery, then gets herself arrested. A young reformer who speaks in front of an "old-fashioned revival" believes in her innocence and tries to help her as they both are from the same hometown and, well, she's not past using her looks to get what she wants. But when, for some reason that I couldn't quite figure out, she actually admits to him she was part of the hold-up, he then assists in sending her to San Quentin. Soon our gal is the "new fish" in prison, and this is a women's prison like no other - if it weren't for the appearance of some older women prisoners in the mix, this would almost look a private girl's school rather than the state Penn! Lounge rocking chairs, newspapers, card games, a "greenhouse" area, a hair stylist, manicures, the "ladies bird club", phonograph record players, and outside - "the sun yard", a regular garden spot. These women can wear their own slinky negligees at night and play records in their room - and one older inmate actually is allowed to keep her own little "lap dog" - h'm.This film is pretty good - the portrayal of the prison so far-fetched it's actually kind of a hoot to watch. I notice the male prisoners (on the other side of the prison) don't seem to have the same conditions as the women as they are shown in regular jail cells with bars. Anyway, Barbara Stanwyck, one of my favorite actresses from that era, gives her usual star performance and acts up a storm - just great as she plays the world-wise gal who'll play hard ball to get what she wants. A really fun film.

Lillian Roth croons "If I could be with you" to a picture of Joe E. Brown. A creepy religious fanatic wears black lingerie in her cell, which is plastered with pictures of her idol, a radio preacher. A society dame who murdered another society dame with ground glass cuddles her Pekingese. A cigar smoking lesbian ("Watch out for her—she likes to wrestle," a new inmate is warned) does exercises. An old lady who used to run a "beauty parlor" reminisces about how she was captured by a detective who came "to get a manicure from one of my girls." It's just another typical night in the women's ward at San Quentin, where the prisoners get radio, ice cream, free run of the recreation room and the privilege to decorate their cells ("rooms—don't be vulgar.") Who knew prison was this much fun? In a pre-Code gem starring Barbara Stanwyck, it is. Stanwyck is Nan Taylor, a glamorous bank robber doing two to five for her role in a heist. Sardonic, jaded, sexy, tough as nails, this is Stanwyck in her early-thirties glory. Just watching her saunter around with her hands stuck in the front pockets of her prison dress, chewing gum, smoking, and distributing zingy put-downs, is a joy. To a self-righteous fellow inmate who tells her there's no punishment bad enough for her, Nan replies, "Being penned up here with a daffodil like you comes awful close." That's about all there is to Ladies They Talk About. The plot concerns a sappy religious reformer (the object of creepy Sister Susie's crush) who falls hard for Nan and pursues her adoringly—even after she shoots him in the arm. There's also plot about a cockamamie escape attempt: how hard could it be to break out of a jail that apparently has no discipline whatsoever? (Though the men, including two of Nan's confederates, don't seem to be having quite as much fun as the women.) This movie doesn't even try to make us want to see Nan reform. It revels in the racy banter of lady criminals, offers a low-down rendition of the St. Louis Blues for a soundtrack, and invites us to worship Barbara Stanwyck at her most cynical and brazenly amoral. Who could ask for anything more?