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.

A predictable love story is enlivened by a dose of pre-code S&M (even light bondage!), and a sexy Claudette Colbert. But the movie suffers from too much "Napoleon" - a bizarre comic relief character who, in the second half, actually gets more screen time than Colbert! That's just not right. ** out of 4.

What could possibly be better than seeing Claudette Colbert seductively flirting and being outrageously alluring? Much to my dismay, the answer is unfortunately every other film that's ever been made. This is unbelievably awful!

The first fifteen minutes promise so much: Claudette Colbert in a selection of saucy outfits trying to get Edmund Lowe to fall in love with her, for a bet. Then however you think you must have died and found yourself in Hell where Satan has devised his most evil torture yet. I assume it's meant to be a comedy. I assume Stuart Erwin's character - an escapee from the lunatic asylum who thinks he's Napoleon, isn't meant to engender a strong desire to throw a brick through your tv? I assume you're meant to know who the hell all those other guys are? I assume after watching this, you're meant to be able to face watching another picture made in 1932?

But seriously, I was genuinely disappointed in this. It sounded such a fun premise but was executed like a primary school nativity play and clearly written by chimpanzees under the influence of class A narcotics. Absolutely puerile, embarrassingly unfunny humour and by the look of it acted under duress. Edmund Lowe appears to be in shock, as though he's reading those lines under gunpoint. Claudette Colbert looks like she just wants to get this over with as quickly as possible. So, so disappointing - Miss Colbert is one of my all time favourites and to see her in this garbage makes me want to protect her reputation by seeking out and destroying all copies of it.

By my score of only 2, you can tell that I thought this film was just really stupid and not the hilarious comedy it was meant to be. The plot is, to put it bluntly, just plain dumb and there isn't much to like about this dopey film. This is one of Claudette Colbert's early films...so this might explain how she got hooked into playing in this turkey!

When the film begins, Helen (Claudette Colbert) is trying to convince a producer to cast her in a Broadway play. He refuses so she makes him a bet that makes no sense--if she can get the playboy, Jack Craigen (Edmund Lowe), to fall for her then she can have the part. So, she quickly gets him to fall for her--and in the process makes a total fool of poor Craigen. Now none of this made any sense and wasn't very good....little did I know that it was (by far) the BEST portion of the movie!

Craigen responds to the embarrassment by kidnapping Helen. He takes her to his vacation home...only to discover that an escaped mental patient (Stu Erwin) is running about the place. Soon, Helen's fiancé shows up and a big showdown results.

Stu Erwin's character was one of the worst I can recall having seen in a 1930s film...he was THAT bad. His mentally ill guy was a giant walking stereotype...and a bad one at that. He wore a Napoleonic style hat and declared he was that dead Emperor!! It was just incredibly dumb...and the rest of the film wasn't any better. Simply terrible from start to finish (and especially at the finish!).

Based on a 1913 stage play and twice filmed during the silent era, The Misleading Lady is a slight pre-code variant of The Taming of the Shrew, with Colbert as a scheming socialite who meets her match in the out-of-touch wildlife explorer (Edmund Lowe) she ventures to ensnare.

Neither gold digger nor vamp, Helen Steele is not particularly interested in landing a man. After all, she got both the finances and the fiancé to be set for life. But what a life! Parties, gossip, and insufferable boredom. It is the chance at reinvention that proves irresistible to her.

Finding it difficult to convince a theatrical producer that she is just right for the part of a siren in a new play he is mounting, Helen vows to give this sceptic a real-life demonstration of her seductive powers. To be considered for the role, she accepts the challenge of getting the thoroughly old-fashioned and downright misogynistic Jack Craigen to propose to her within three days of their first encounter. So, Helen's engagement ring changes fingers and the bet is on. Jack, who has just returned from a jungle expedition, turns out to be surprisingly easy prey—until he discovers, in a rather humiliating manner, what we know from the start: that Helen has neither been forthright nor free.

Can this modern woman be conquered by brute force? Jack is enamoured enough to give it a shot. This is pre-code romance, so pretty much anything goes as Helen is abducted, trapped, stripped and chained. The farce, which also confronts the increasingly terrified young woman with a lunatic on the run (Stuart Erwin), would have been more enjoyable and less disconcerting in its handling of the conquest had it not been approached like a neo- Gothic melodrama, a genre for which director Stuart Walker—the most "misleading" person in this production—had a far greater affinity.

In 1935, Colbert's most memorable shrew-taming co-star, Clark Gable, played the role of Jack in a Lux Radio Theatre adaptation. Yet even though The Misleading Lady does not lack sex, sophistication, and subversion—the key ingredients of the later screwball comedies—It Happened One Night it just ain't.