IMDb plot summary: An upper-crust artist hires a 'party girl' as a model; romance follows.
Directed by Frank Capra. Starring Barbara Stanwyck, Ralph Graves, and Lowell Sherman.
Ladies of Leisure is the 1930 movie that made Barbara Stanwyck a star after a series of flops. She plays an escort who becomes a model for a painter, and the two fall in love despite her unsavory background. The film certainly paints its story in broad strokes and doesn't ever quite sell the narrative that the two ever like each other until, bam, they're in love and you don't know why. But there are some really interesting moments here, particularly in seeing an early Stanwyck performance where the persona she crafted so beautifully in her later films was not yet there. She's flightier here than I've ever seen her, and while it's a little startling, it mostly works, and when she brings home the emotional stakes at the end as she has to decide whether or not to leave the man she loves, it DEFINITELY works. It's also interesting as an early Frank Capra film, as he uses some intriguing fade-ins and fade-outs that I'm not fully convinced make sense, but they are definitely an artistic editing *choice*, which has usually been less noticeable in other films of 1930, so it was fun to see it here.
How it entered my Flickchart:
Ladies of Leisure < The Keep
Ladies of Leisure > BASEketball
Ladies of Leisure > Sullivan's Travels
Ladies of Leisure < Venom
Ladies of Leisure > Onibaba
Ladies of Leisure > Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World
Ladies of Leisure < Remember the Night
Ladies of Leisure > Marathon
Ladies of Leisure < Moonstruck
Ladies of Leisure < Camelot
Ladies of Leisure < Fish Tank
Ladies of Leisure < Funny Girl
Final spot: #2038 out of 3553, or 43%.
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