The women in prison genre reached its peak in the 1950s, but the progenitor of those films can be found in 1933's Ladies They Talk About. Based on a play by actress Dorothy Mackaye, which in turn was loosely based on her actual experiences in a women's prison, Ladies is sheer delight for lovers of hard-boiled dames slinging snappy phrases around like so much hash. As is often the case with films in this genre, the plot has a number of credibility gaps; most of them are passable and add to the general enjoyment, but the final one - in which the heroine shoots and wounds the man she hates, only to immediately declare her love for him, after which he tells the cops that it's nothing and he plans to marry her - does take the cake. The soft country club conditions of the women's prison, which includes dorm-style rooms with lace curtains, is also a bit hard to take. But it doesn't matter, for Ladies has the one and only Barbara Stanwyck on hand to add her special magic to the salty dialogue and to make one happy to overlook any problems with the screenplay. Add in a good supporting cast that includes Lillian Roth warbling a song to a picture of Joe E. Brown, and you have a picture that may not be great but is definitely entertaining.
Stanwyck is absolutely stunning, and even if the rest of the film wasn't any good (although it was), she really made it worth watching.
February 25, 1933
A Woman Bandit.
A.D.S.
When a reformer and a dashing female bank bandit fall in love, their home life may be somewhat as illustrated in the lingering finale of "Ladies They Talk About," which was unreeled at the Capitol yesterday. After a torrid argument in which Nan, the gun-girl, accuses her beloved of frustrating a jail-break in which two of her pals were killed, she loses her temper, draws a gun from her handbag and shoots him. "I didn't mean to do that," Nan remarks a moment later as David Slade falls to the floor with a bullet in his shoulder. "Why, that's all right, Nan," responds her husband-to-be. "It's nothing."
The story is certainly on the violent side of drama, but not all of its entertainment is as wild as that "romantic interlude." A good part of the action takes place in a women's reformatory where Nan is an inmate, that young woman having arrived behind bars with the assistance of her friend, the reformer. Torn between those difficult twin urges of love and duty, David decides to heed both, and he therefore enlivens Nan's dreary life in prison with love notes, visits and promises of a speedy parole.
It is in the prison scenes that the film provides some interesting drama. "Ladies They Talk About" is effective when it is describing the behavior of the prisoners, the variety of their misdemeanors, their positions in the social whirl outside, their ingenuity in giving an intimate domestic touch to the prison, and their frequently picturesque way of exhibiting pride, jealousy, vanity and other untrammeled feminine emotions.
Remember this was written in 1933:
Maude Eburne, Lillian Roth, Dorothy Burgess and a Negress whose name is listed as Mme. Sul-te-Wan give this part of the picture a diversity of mood and chara
