ridiculous rating

Don't listen to the Hype. It's awful

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Slow-moving, over-long hundred minutes that a few years ago would have been dubbed a "woman's" picture. Though directed by the legendary Frank Capra, too many scenes labor at getting the point across-- the overnight episode, the many scenes of Kay {Stanwyck} "pining" for her man. Frankly, I found myself hitting "fast forward" to eliminate some of the redundancies. Now, I'm not opposed to love stories; I'm just opposed to the needless stretching of a point, and this film has too many over-worked scenes. Too bad that the sparkling opening scene proves misleading. My guess is that movie makers in 1929 were still feeling their way through the new sound technology, even the talented Capra. Certainly, his later films show both the economy and pacing generally absent from this early effort.At least the young Stanwyck gets to show her acting chops as she runs the emotional gamut from great joy to deep sadness. It's quite a performance in an especially demanding role. The trouble is her co-star Ralph Graves has all the charm and appeal of dried cement. Next to Stanwyck, he's a deadening presence and makes drawn-out scenes seem endless. As a supposed artist, he's simply miscast. Unfortunately, he also sounds like one of those silent screen stars unable to deliver the new technology in convincing fashion. Too bad that the enlivening Prevost and the amusing Sherman don't have more scenes to boost the energy level.Nonetheless, there is one scene that almost redeems the rest. Mrs. Strong (Nance O'Neill) visits Kay to break off the disreputable Kay's engagement to her son Jerry (Graves). In an ace performance, Strong enters as a proud, assured woman of wealth and breeding, convinced that son Jerry is about to make a huge mistake marrying a floozie. However, as Kay's noble nature emerges under a common concern for Jerry's wellbeing, Mom begins to see past Kay's dubious reputation just as Jerry has. The emotional stages each moves through toward a mutual respect proves quite compelling. It's a marvelously written and performed sequence, full of nuance and conflicting emotion, and in my view the film's real centerpiece. Anyway, for those interested, the movie now stands mainly as an early look (before her teeth were fixed) at one of the screen's outstanding personalities.

Frank Capra's pre-code early talkie involving class consciousness and loose flappers is a rather slow going, sloppy melodrama that is salvaged by the fresh performances of Barbara Stanwyck, Marie Prevost and Lowell Sherman. Poor little rich boy Ralph Strong aspires to be a great painter but feels lost and empty amid his roaring twenties hanger ons bent on pleasure. He escapes them one night to clear his head and meets Kay Arnold, a professional escort, rowing a boat to escape the same madness from a yacht party. She agrees to model for Strong who eventually falls for her but is rejected by his family due to her past and station. After a visit from his mother Kay sacrifices her future happiness by agreeing to run off with one of Strong's party animal buddies.There's plenty of racy double entendre dialog in Ladies, convincingly uttered by the perfectly dissipated Lowell Sherman and low rent good time girls Stanwyck and the tragic Marie Prevost who all but steals the film in a supporting role. Ralph Graves as Strong on the other hand is wimpy and washed out, behaving at times like a sulking child.Capra and his regular cameraman Joseph Walker offer some beautiful tableaux that evoke the jazz age as well as beautifully lit atmospheric scenes of sensual tension. He allows these scenes to lag however and it doesn't help matters that Stanwyck and Graves lack chemistry. Other Capra tropes like the mawkishly sentimental scenes involving the parents and the lovers and the requisite redemption at film's end take whatever life Ladies of Leisure has and drowns it in a tearjerker ocean.

Barbara Stanwyck looked sweet and innocent, even though her character is supposed to have been around.For someone making only her fourth movie, she was a treat to watch, and not just because of her looks. She gave a terrific performance.Others have criticized Ralph Graves, in his twelfth year of film acting, but I thought he was marvelously realistic, giving a wonderful under-acted performance.Jimmy Cagney said when he, and some others, came to California with their under-acting, they changed Hollywood. Graves might have been just ahead of his time.Lowell Sherman was surely the pluperfect movie cad. In this film, too, he gave a superb performance.Marie Prevost, though, stole the show ... well, she at least came in a close second to Stanwyck. Her brash, brassy character was funny, touching, adorable ... even if she wasn't someone a young man might want to bring home to mother.Again there was a corny, silly telling of the story via a newspaper headline that surely could have been better told some other way; but, over all, this movie is a good story, well told and well acted, and a great look at its time in history.By the way, a note to Yard Bird: Most likely the reason it was made in silent and sound versions was to be sure every theater could play it. At the time, not all theaters had yet converted to sound.It was the sound version that played in May of 2009 on Turner Classic Movies. I would guess it is now available for purchase.Added early on 7 October 2017: In fact, "Ladies of Leisure" is available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJ8HmUcuJfU

One reviewer here complimented the whole cast of "Ladies of Leisure." Well, I must respectfully disagree. I found Ralph Graves' performance to be rather wooden. Graves had been in films since he was teenager just after Word Ware I had ended, but clearly he found it difficult to deliver a natural performance in the sound medium.I do recommend the film for historical purposes if nothing else. It was released in the Spring of 1930 and may have been filmed in late 1929. That would definitely qualify "Ladies of Leisure" as a member of that first generation of sound films dating from 1928 to 1930.One thing I wondered about is whether a boom mic was used. I think someone else opined that hidden mics, placed here and there around the set were still used in this production. I do know from my reading that sound film technology was making progress just about on a week by week basis in those early days.