Lady with a Past (1932)

A brilliant film that helped define a genre

Clever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.

Wow! What a bizarre film! Unfortunately the few funny moments there were were quite overshadowed by it's completely weird and random vibe throughout.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

"Lady with a Past" is Constance Bennett as an unlikely bookish wallflower who sails from New York City to Paris where she engineers a fake sex scandal hoping it will make her the talk of the town by the time she returns and thereby attract the attention of young men who find her literary chatter a big bore. She also talks to herself and pretends to be singing out loud when caught in the act.Her co-conspirator in Paris is the golden voiced Ben Lyons whom she picks up at a sidewalk café after he tricks her into paying his food and drink tab. But her heart really belongs to David Manners, a handsome member of her social set who is looking for someone more exciting.If this all seems terribly unexciting, it is. Then why watch? Miss Bennett, of course. They don't make 'em like that any more. In the pre-production publicity it was said that Miss Bennett was being fitted for 17 gowns to wear in the film. I didn't count, but she probably did.

Audiences of 1932 must have been surprised to see la Bennett play an unassertive society girl who wants to be married, but who, despite her stunning looks and pots of money, is shunned by the bachelors. Although sister Joan would have been more believable in the role of Miss Unpopularity, the story gets interesting when our tongue-tied caterpillar goes to Paris and is transformed by fun loving Ben Lyon into a social butterfly with a half dozen suitors fluttering around her, including the shallow boy from back home. And now that she can pick and choose, who do you think she ends up with at the finale? No matter. This is a pleasant little film and it's fun to watch Bennett sip champagne cocktails and flirt with fortune hunters in one stunning costume after another. No wonder her fans loved her.

... that premise being that Constance Bennett as Venice Muir cannot attract a man at all. Constance isn't some plainly dressed and drably made-up wallflower that physically transforms, which is the plot you'd expect. From scene one she is the glamorous looking woman she usually plays, yet we are to believe that because she wants to discuss the books she's read that men would chew through wood to get out of being in the same room with her? With her looks and bearing she should reasonably expect to recite the dictionary and yet be followed by suitors - men simply aren't that deep.David Manners proposes marriage to Venice when drunk, slinks away when sober, and leaves Venice wondering what she'll have to do to change her luck with men. Her solution - hire someone (Ben Lyon) to be her "boyfriend" and tell tales about her lack of virtue and her exciting nature that in turn should attract some actual suitors. These things never work out as planned - I'll let you watch and see what happens.

This is a charming, subtle little pre-code in which everything is implied and little actually shown.Constance Bennet is a good girl from a good New York family and no one finds her interesting. In Paris she finds Ben Lyon, an indigent American who bums a beer from her. She hires him as a gigolo and he shows her how to be fascinating to men, using frequent kicks to the shin to encourage her education.Lyon is particularly good in his fast-talking role and Miss Bennet is at her most charming. The two have real chemistry together and Edward Griffith directs with a gracefully moving camera under the control of the under-rated Hal Mohr. All of these combine to produce a comedy that is knowing without being cynical.