Sua Mulher Perante Deus

Shortly after the story begins, someone abandons a baby aboard a freighter with a note attached to him. It says that the baby belongs to someone aboard the ship and she was leaving it forever. The Captain (Gary Cooper) at first wants to drop the baby off ashore but soon decides to keep the cute little guy. But he cannot run the ship AND care for a baby at the same time, so he looks for a woman to help with raising the kid. Soon he finds Sally (Claudette Colbert) and she feeds him a line about being the daughter of a recently deceased missionary...when she actually is a bit of a tramp. Despite this, she turns out to be a good foster mother and things seem to be going just fine. However, a crew member recognizes Sally and thinks that because she's had a past that it entitles him to attack her! But the Captain hears the commotion and comes to Sally's defense. In the ensuing scuffle, the evil crew member is knocked off the ship and presumed lost. But this isn't the end to all this....and what happens next, well, you'll just have to see it for yourself.

I really enjoyed this film, though I am sure some might object to it being a bit schmaltzy. What I liked most is that the story attacked the old so-called 'double-standard'...where men are supposed to be 'experienced' and that women, if they have similar experiences, are tramps! I appreciated the message and enjoyed seeing where the film went. Very unusual and worth seeing.

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.

A ship's captain discovers an abandoned baby and hires a dance hall girl, posing as a missionary's daughter, to be the child's nanny on a voyage from the Caribbean to New York.

Pre-code film with good performances from Gary Cooper as the captain and Claudette Colbert as the girl. The story is somewhat improbable but that does not detract from enjoyment of the film.

Well, this movie is certainly something. I'm just not sure what.

Gary Cooper plays the hardbitten captain of a merchant ship; while docked at a South American port someone leaves a caucasian baby in his boat. Cooper plans to take it with him to the US, he just needs someone to take care of it on the voyage. Enter Aloysius (Hamtree Harrington, what a great name) and Mark (Sidney Easton), his two African-American stewards – bumbling caricatures who speak in the phony "black American" patois acceptable in early Hollywood. IE, lots of "yassirs" and bug-eyed expressions of shock. Claudette appears as a seaport "entertainer" who wants to get back to NYC; she comes aboard as the baby's surrogate, employing skills she didn't realize she had. Along the way the baby instills in her the desire to "straighten up," and her and Cooper fall in love to boot. Only, Claudette has a shady past and it seems that every other mate on the ship has had her at one dingy seaport or another – all of them except for Cooper, that is, who despite being hardbitten is also a little too naïve. He buys Claudette's "my parents were missionaries who died and now I'm all alone" story and gets ruffled if anyone doubts her, ruffled to the point of fighting one of his men and knocking him overboard. It all comes to a head in NYC with a truly underwhelming courtroom scene.

Really, the whole movie is underwhelming. I mean, the film opens with a stock shot of a merchant vessel plying through the water, then a cut to the deck, and Gary Cooper ambles his way across it. THAT'S how the movie begins, no fanfare, no buildup, just another day at sea with Gary Cooper. Gary Cooper and his two racial stereotype crewmembers, that is; I have a theory that Malcolm X saw this film as a boy and it set him on his way. For truly this movie is offensive. I'm an open-minded guy and don't get offended easily, but this film goes out of its way to shoehorn every black stereotype into the characters of Aloysius and Mark. They are presented as incompetent nitwits who exist only to bulge their eyes and mutter banalities – in between loud prayers to "Gawd," that is.

And it's not just that. Whole chunks of this film are composed of nothing more than a baby crying. Minute after minute evaporates as the baby screams and bawls, with various characters attempting in vain to placate it. In addition the movie is very static, paced so leisurely that it appears to be out for a Sunday drive. Cooper can do little to save it; his character is a vapid sort, and it's obvious he had a hard time reckoning the polar characteristics with which he's been foisted: we're supposed to believe his character is a non-nonsense sea captain who commands respect in his grizzled men, yet at the same time he's so naïve as to buy whole-hog Claudette's obviously fake background story. As for Claudette – well, what can you expect: she's as good as ever. Her role offers her a bit more room and she does a good job portraying the whole "bad girl goes good" angle. This early in her career she still has that waiflike look – big Betty Boop eyes, fragile body. I swear this lady drank some sort of elixir – just compare how she looks in this film to say "Sign of The Cross," released the following year, or even "Cleopatra," from three years later. It's like she went through a second puberty.

Production-wise the movie's underwhelming as well. Don't expect the usual Paramount opulence here. Rather than a nice portrayal of a madhouse South American bar early in the film, the sets are mostly spartan-looking cabins within Cooper's ship, or the equally-austere deck. Once the ship gets back to New York we're only graced with a few stock shots of the city, and from there to a basic office room for the trial. The direction, too, offers little to appreciate; the whole thing, from beginning to end, is as basic as bread.

Special note: This film contains one of the worst line readings I've ever had the pleasure to hear. I'm talking "Ed Wood production" bad. When Claudette's back with her high-living galpals in NYC, all of them sitting around in negligees with their legs dangling in pure Pre-Code lasciviousness, she gets ribbed by them for falling in love with Cooper. Try as they might, the girls can't get Claudette to revert to her old ways. One of the galpals, a pretty blonde, shakes her head and says, "Well, I just give up." It is, by far, one of the worst deliveries of a line EVER.

Veteran Sloman's long career was winding down in 1931, but he shows a steady hand in this cliché tale of a stern but naive young sea captain (Cooper) who falls for the "entertainer" (Colbert) who, desperate to escape from a South American port, bluffs her way on board as nurse for a foundling baby dumped in the ship's dinghy. Romance takes second place, however, to scenes stolen by the engagingly vivacious and good-natured baby (Richard Spiro), and by the ship's African-American servants, played in Amos and Andy-style cross-talk by Hamtree Harrington and Sidney Easton. (Journeyman director of photography William O. Steiner went on to light a number of films featuring African American entertainers.) HIS WOMAN is a respectable B movie, worth seeing for the almost exaggeratedly tall young Cooper and the detail of Colbert's tramp friends, who lounge around their shared apartment in pre-Production Code undress. Colbert's first appearance, arriving by boat at night in search of a nightclub job, and some byplay in the cantina between Cooper and dancer Raquel Davidovich, who tempts him by kissing a flower, both recall Marlene Dietrich and Cooper in the previous year's MOROCCO, suggesting Paramount may have hoped to trade on that film's success.