The Misleading Lady

This movie would be a complete disaster without the presence of Claudette Colbert. One of her earliest roles, she's as youthful as anything I've ever seen her in, 28 at the time but seeming several years younger, her voice is also more girlish in this period than the famous throaty coo from her superstar years. Claudette is beautiful, appealing, and proving her talent, giving a good performance in a lousy movie, perhaps the worst of the 40 or so I've seen her in to date. She's cast as a bored New York socialite who declines an heiress' invitation for an stay at her estate for a week only to change her mind when she learns one of the other guests is a famous Broadway producer. Claudette wants an acting career and tries to talk the producer into casting her in his next play to the point of ignoring another guest, well-known game hunter Edmund Lowe.. The producer tells Claudette she's all wrong for the part, a seductress while he sees her as the refined good girl type. Claudette makes a bet with him she can be the coquette by betting she can seduce Lowe and get him to propose marriage within three days. She's successful at this but it blows up on her - she falls in love with Lowe but when he finds she has recorded her proposal (on one of those fascinating contraptions of the period, a recording record player) he's so angry he kidnaps her and takes her off to his own rural lodge. And that's where a promising movie goes all to hell. Lowe's behavior is brazenly sexual harassment and sadistic by modern standards and pretty much so even in that era, at one point ripping her blouse off when she refuses to change clothes and, at another point, chain-locking her to a fireplace mantle. Add to the mix an escaped resident from a nearby mental institution (bland comic actor Stuart Erwin), two apparent drunks seemingly lost, and you have a total mess of a movie, not funny and certainly not appealing.