Female
            
Director: Various
Year: 1933
Rating: 7.0
"Romance? Me? I don't have time". Love "is a career in itself. Takes too much time and energy. To me a woman in love is a pathetic spectacle. She is either so miserable that she wants to die or she is so happy, you want to die. A long time ago, I decided to travel the same open road that men travel. I'd rather have a canary".

The first forty-minutes of this one-hour film is quite marvelous, sexy and amusing until it collapses into humdrum convention. It is Pre-Code and shows it in many ways. Not only with its feminist point of view but also with its sexual openness. For audiences back then it must have felt quite novel and revolutionary - but of course they lose that provocative stance by the end which has many reviewers written today upset. Get over it. This was 1933. What did people expect? The main character Miss Drake is played by Ruth Chatterton who is mainly forgotten these days but was very popular for a series of strong female roles in the early 1930s. She was a good choice - in her private life she was one of the few female aviators in the country and good friends with Amelia Earhart. When her roles began to lessen by the late 1930s because she was past forty, she just quit the movies, went back to the theater and became a successful novelist. She is perfect for this role.

 

She runs an automobile manufacturing company that she inherited from her father. It is her life as she rapid-fire makes decisions and gives orders and shoots down any man who she takes a disdain for. It is a marvelous scene of her in the middle of a hectic day. Then at night, she turns into a seductress looking for one-nighters with young handsome men from the office. Why don't you come to my house around seven and I will take a look at your plans. She presses the buzzer for vodka and her butler (Robert Grieg - always seems to play a butler) brings it so that she can warm up her prey. She throws down the cushion on the floor and tells him, join me. And gives them a look that is purely carnal in nature.

 

Nothing is shown, but it leaves no doubt what happens afterwards on those pillows. Men being the silly creatures they are of course think it's serious and the next thing they know, they are being transferred to Montreal or Paris. Men throw proposals and compliments at her like they are in fashion this year and she just walks away. Until she meets George Brent, an engineer in the company who will take no guff from her. Brent was actually her husband at the time of filming, but not for much longer. Once Brent comes into the film, it is like they let the helium out of the balloon. But it was so much fun till then.