I love pre-code Hollywood and Carole Lombard is a stunningly wonderful actress. Charles Laughton is seriously overacting this part even for a "B" movie melodrama of this era although he did make this villain thoroughly unlikable. I really wanted to care, but just didn't find it anywhere in this film. It's important to note that there was something about the play upon which this film is based (and re-made over and over again), "The Hangman's Whip" 1933 which played for one month in New York at the St James Theatre, that seemed to entrance Paramount, maybe because they got it real cheap. To see a story like this done properly, Marlene Dietrich directed by Tay Garnett and with a young and handsome John Wayne in Seven Sinners (1940) is the height of this genre.
Review of White Woman
