Well, this was an unexpectedly entertaining and thoughtful film. Don't look up the story first or you'll not feel the jolts of the clever and quite unpredictable twists. For 1932, this is a lot more realistic than was common then giving us a perfect reflection of that age. This has easily as much seedy grime as anything they were doing at Warners.
Gary Cooper is uncharacteristically lively in this. Not sure his management style which ranges from negotiation by fists to smashing a glass bottle into a guy's botty with a crowbar would be that acceptable now though. Not sure his sexist arrogance: the purpose of a man is to work, the purpose of a woman is to bring up a man's child, would make him particularly endearing either but under that alpha-male macho man there's a kind hearted ...gorilla below. Gary Cooper can sometimes be so lugubrious that he can send you to sleep but under the dynamic direction of Edward Sloman (no, never heard of him either) Cooper is like an erupting volcano of testosterone.
He steals every scene including those with the divine Miss Colbert - and that's coming from her biggest fan! It's not just Mr Cooper or Miss Colbert who give excellent, realistic and natural performances, all of Mr Sloman's actors seem like real people with real and authentic personalities. If this is representative of Edward Sloman's work then the guy should be more well known. He doesn't just make his characters come to life, he makes what you're looking at become reality. You can smell the stench of the filthy streets of the port, you almost have a sense of danger yourself.
Two familiar 1930s themes are tackled here. The somewhat sexist title itself: HIS WOMAN is purposely controversial. OK, we're a hundred years ago so don't expect equality but questioning Cooper's Captain Sam's misogynistic attitudes are central to this picture. The other trope is snobbery - in this case taken to the extreme. When Claudette Colbert first meets Gary Cooper she makes him believe that she's the daughter of a missionary and that's fine and dandy. When however he discovers that she's worked in a brothel then that's too much for this fine, upstanding, morally righteous Christian...and frequenter himself of brothels. It's interesting to wonder what inner conflicts are going on in his mind, to wonder how he can justify what he believes or to wonder whether he's just an idiot.
The focal point of the whole picture centres on a crewman trying to rape Colbert's Sally having discovered her occupation. The question - as utterly ludicrous as it seems to us now is: is it ok to rape a young woman if she had once worked as a prostitute? Bizarrely the consensus seems at the time to be a definite yes! There's not even any suggestion that the crewmen was out of order - she was the guilty one! The 1930s wasn't just another time, it was another world!
All this commentary makes this sound like it's a very deep and heavy film but nothing could be further from the truth. Edward Sloman's manages to set off all these little explosions in your brain whilst still maintaining an almost upbeat light-hearted mood.
