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Thanks for the memories!

I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

A pretty good film of its kind, with Barbara Stanwyck giving her usual high level of performance. I find Ralph Graves, who plays her artist/lover, to be a stiff and totally miscast as an artist. He seems more like an undertaker and the worst part of the movie is trying to figure out why Barbara's character was ever attracted to him in the first place. Otherwise, acting is good and the plot is one that we've seen before; poor, "working" girl in love with son of a rich, important family. Of course they object.The only time Barbara does not ring true is in the emotional scene when his mother comes to ask her to give him up. It is a bit over the top. Again, the problem is Ralph Graves. He is not worth all of that drama and sobbing. And what an odd-looking man he was, with an unusually shaped head.Kind of a ridiculous ending, but so many of the movies of the day had that in common. At least she was allowed to live.

This early talkie (so early I understand there was a silent version shot simultaneously) introduced me to the actor Lowell Sherman. Sherman plays drunken cad/best friend to leading man Ralph Graves, who portrays a rich artist. Barbara Stanwyck plays a roaring twenties-esque party girl who ends up modeling for Graves.Stanwyck is excellent and captivating. This was early in her career, and it must've been clear that she was destined to become a star after this film came out. Ralph Graves, on the other hand, turns in one of the worst performances I've ever seen. Stiff, wooden, he almost sinks the picture. He doesn't connect emotionally with his own character or anyone else's. His career seemed to tank after this film. No surprise there. Lloyd Sherman plays your proto-typical cad, and he's the best thing in the movie. He's a scoundrel, overtly trying to get down Stanwyck's pants while still maintaining his charm. Though you're supposed to root against him, you kind of like this ne'er do well. He fully embodies the role, and as far as talkies are concerned, I'd say he invented the drunken cad, the inebriated sophisticate. Actors as disparate as William Powell (think Thin Man) to Dudley Moore (think Arthur) owe Sherman a debt of gratitude. Like Ralph Graves, Sherman is kind of forgotten today. It's not because, like Graves, he didn't have the goods to last and make his mark. It's because Sherman died a few years later, of pneumonia. At the time of his death, he was just starting to direct as well. If you love charming movie scoundrels, raise a glass in Mr. Sherman's honor. He would approve.

I love a good weepie -- particularly when I have no idea in advance that it's going to be one; every so often my over-the-top spoiler-avoiding policy does pay off in trumps! -- and this film turns out to be a real corker. I haven't seen so much surreptitious sniffling among the audience after the lights went up since "A Matter of Life and Death": and that's a compliment.Perhaps it's no surprise that this is the first of the early Capra films to really click into place with me so far, given that I've found that the most successful scenes from his silents have been the poignant moments rather than the sometimes crude treatment of the humour -- Mack Sennett's influence perhaps hard to shake. This time the director gets a sparkling dialogue script and a stellar leading lady in a five-star "woman's picture", and for my money the results exceed those from some of the better-known 'Capraesque' films of his later years.Having recently seen and been disappointed by the celebrated "An Affair to Remember", I would add that "Ladies of Leisure", clearly falling in the same genre, managed to succeed for me where the later melodrama somehow failed to deliver. The banter is involving, the characters engaging, and the central romance -- despite falling under all the cases of cliché and despite my initial longing in both cases to see expectations undermined -- manages to break through in convincing reversal and enlist my sympathies utterly. I was particularly engaged by Ralph Graves, who infuses what could have been an all too worthy two-dimensional hero, with scarcely a defect to his character, with a full measure of conviction as a human being and a great deal of likability and charm; I am amazed to see all the specific IMDb criticisms of him as 'wooden' in this role, and wonder if it is a question of English versus American expectations of male behaviour. I found him delightful in a role that could easily have been played very badly.Barbara Stanwyck, of course, is the central figure, depicting with utter believability both the hard-as-nails shell of the party girl for hire whom Jerry first meets, and the glimpse of 'Hope' that inspires him to employ her as a model for a new painting -- and then spend frustrating days trying to relocate beneath her wise-cracking, gum-chewing exterior! In her scene with Jerry's mother she plays out the time-honoured renunciation theme with the passion and conviction of a Violetta Valery; indeed it's hard not to hear echoes of "La Traviata" in her role here. And if you have ever longed to hear the 'fallen woman' in this situation instead answer back her sanctimonious accuser with "No, I won't give him up and you can't make me -- get out!", Miss Stanwyck flings all the fire and justification into the defiance for which one could wish; even if she eventually lapses into allowing herself to be beaten down by convention. Fortunately, she has what Violetta lacked: a pragmatic friend with both feet upon the ground and no qualms about eavesdropping when clearly necessary...The long-delayed love scenes are so real as to be tactile in their intensity, the sparing and well-delivered poignancies tear at your heart, the melodrama has your pulse racing, yet the film is often also very funny. The banter between the two girls is as hard-boiled with dry fizz as that of any Warner Brothers product, and Lowell Sherman, dissolutely charming and almost permanently sozzled, is the heroine's male counterpart in more ways than one, though Kay's streetwise wits are a match for almost anyone. There is a hilarious scene where Dot is attempting to lose weight via a patent machine at the same time as trying to answer the door, an echo of earlier physical humour amid dozens of moments that are half-laugh, half-tears.The only acting that I felt sometimes struck the wrong note was that of the older generation, Nance O'Neill and George Fawcett as Jerry's parents, who slide a little too far into the sonorous melodrama vein when it comes to the big confrontations. Otherwise, from its bombs-on-the-sidewalk smash opening to its final fadeout, this film rarely puts a foot wrong. It could so easily have been utterly hackneyed; films that go for high emotion gamble everything on transfixing the audience out of potential disbelief. Instead, it resonates not only with the audience and mores of its era but down to our own. Miss Stanwyck deserved to be a star on this showing, and she would be.

Considering that movies only began to talk in 1928, this early sound film starring BARBARA STANWYCK as a girl of ill repute (she calls herself a party girl), and RALPH GRAVES as an artist who wants to use her as a model, is not bad at all. It's certainly one of the better jobs in sound recording for a film made in the early '30s. As usual with films of this period, there is almost no music on the soundtrack except for the moment when "The End" is flashed on the screen. In the TCM print I watched, the screen then fades to black while some "exit" music is played against a dark screen.Stanwyck is the prostitute with a heart of gold who finds a good man and doesn't want to let him go, even when his family objects to their union when he proposes marriage. She is convinced by the mother to give him up--but circumstances change after she makes a rash decision.Stanwyck is excellent at conveying the brassy qualities of the character, but then reveals the softer nature of the girl as she falls in love with the man who only wants to paint her portrait. The tenderness of the romance that develops is full of nuances that one wouldn't expect from a Frank Capra film. The sentimental ending is more in keeping with his usual style.RALPH GRAVES gives a quiet, assured performance as the man who finds that he does really love Stanwyck. LOWELL SHERMAN does his usual schtick as an inebriated friend who flounces around making wisecracks. MARIE PREVOST has some good moments as Stanwyck's roommate and NANCE O'NEIL does a good job as Grave's well-meaning mother.Stanwyck fans will appreciate her well modulated performance.