Without being familiar with the play by Edward Ellis and wife that is the basis of this film, I would hazard a guess that its fine screenwriters Cyril Hume and Peter Ruric (aka Paul Cain) were doing their best to humanize a shallow, formulaic kind of mystery play--and did not wholly succeed. The basic idea, an author who is a suave, elegant ladies man having to cope with a multiplicity of ex-mistresses, all worried about their reputations being tarnished if he detailed his affairs with them in his forthcoming book, is a good one. (Women must've been a lot more concerned about their "reputations" then than they are now.) Paul Lukas is, as always, very good in the principal role and the supporting cast of beauties are at least adequate, sometimes better than that. But it was done at budget-conscious Universal, obviously hastily made, and with particularly anodyne sets. (I doubt that art director Charles D. Hall designed anything new for this picture, likely reused standing sets.)
One can't help thinking the same story, with much the same script, would have been done better as an "A" picture at Paramount with William Powell in the lead and, say, Mitchell Leisen directing. Aside from having a more polished look and more elegant sets, it would, most importantly, avoid the rushed feeling we get here. It seems like director Edwin L. Marin was always conscious of the need to fit the story into a 60-minute running time, not wanting to dwell on any scene longer than necessary, so that the relationships between Lukas and the various women seem shallower and more transitory than intended. Of the actresses the standout is now unfairly forgotten Dorothy Burgess, portraying his most lasting love, a sensitive woman who appears to be recovering from a long self-pitying drunk. (Not spelled out, but that's the implication.) She has a couple of marvelous scenes and the most touching line in the movie: "Oh, why don't you send me to South America? No one has any nerves down there." ("Nerves" apparently meaning nervous breakdowns.) She says it so poignantly, it plays much better than it reads.
Of the other actors, the excellent Sara Haden is somewhat wasted as Lukas's self-sacrificing secretary. Patricia Ellis plays a rather naive young book jacket designer who thinks she is in love with the great man but who is upset, disillusioned to find--duh!--that Lukas has another girl friend. Her acting is unimpressive but her bosom is. Props to Universal's costumer Vera West for putting her in a dress that, while "tasteful," shows them off in all their abundance. Richard Carle amusingly plays Lukas's publisher, who harks back to an era when most publishing houses were essentially run by one man (outstanding examples: Alfred Knopf and Horace Liveright). Decisions about what they wanted to publish and how to market it were made without recourse to committee-think or numbers crunching. That era is of course long gone, though maybe still exists to some extent in some of the smaller niche publishers.
I don't think director Marin brought much to the movie; on the other hand, he did permit Dorothy Burgess's scenes to come through with all the actress's sensitivity intact, just as he did a decade later with Signe Hasso's scenes in the otherwise routine George Raft vehicle Johnny Angel. So give him credit for something. His only directorial mannerism that I noticed was a penchant for staging sort-of-romantic scenes with the woman standing with her back to the man (Lukas) and talking to him coquettishly over her shoulder. Some of the time it works, some of the time it's just a mannerism.
