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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.

It Happened One Night is her best performance but this really isn't far behind.Not only does she look at her best but plays her comic and dramatic scenes quite brilliantly. Plenty of her later comic roles lacked the freshness and sharpness of this 1932 film.Hidden Gem is too often used to describe films but if you are a fan of Colbert ,then you need to watch her performance. The film is not as funny as it could be but it has its moments and is well worth a watch. Edmund Lowe was excellent as the love interest for Colbert.I would go as far to say that his quick wit and comic timing were as good as any leading man I have seen her work with. The worst part of the film is the mad Napoleon character who totally overplays the role and really isn't that funny

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!).

This Paramount Pre-Code was the third or fourth time this story had been filmed. Claudette Colbert is an actress trying to land a role in a playwright's unwritten show and to demonstrate she can play a fall-in-love-at-first-sight lead, she tries to make big-game-hunter Edmond Lowe fall in love with her, cutting a record of the event to demonstrate her talents. It works, but when other people find and play the record, Lowe blows up, kidnaps her and takes her to his country house.

They're pretty good for most of the show, but the third act falls apart, as hordes of people (including Will Geer in his first screen role) wander in and out, including the inevitable escapee from an insane asylum who believes he is Napoleon. Perhaps others could have pulled it off, but this cast and crew can't.

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.