the audience applauded

People are voting emotionally.

An Exercise In Nonsense

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

This light weight has the look of an assembly line romance movie of the 1930's. Bette Davis & Henry Fonda get a few on screen kisses. This one has an only so so script which is what holds back the finished product.If your fan of Fonda or Davis, this is worth a look. Jezebel is definitely better.Interesting the detective in this movie is played by Syndey Toler who would later take over the series Charlie Chan from Warner Oland. Fonda needs approval from his father to live with Davis, but once he gets it, she balks and decides to run away.At the end of the movie they reconnect- but the story is left open ended as to where they go from here. Happy Birthday today to Henry Fonda.

I was delighted to find another Bette Davis movie that I hadn't seen. I loved the goodness of the women in the story. I thought the acting was excellent. The movie highlighted the dilemmas women can face when they operate with genuine love and self-sacrifice as a motive. I noticed that the two young wives looked remarkably alike, and I wondered if it were by design.I get that the story might be a bit of a stretch, but truth is no stranger than fiction, and the story was plausible for me. I would watch this movie again in time. I enjoyed seeing such a young Bette Davis and Henry Fonda. One thing I especially enjoyed about the movie is that it was operating in the social conscience of the time.

The kind of contrived mess that gives the term "women's picture" a bad name. Bette Davis is the former gun moll turned respectable legal secretary who marries a wealthy, irresponsible weakling (Henry Fonda, poorly miscast). When Fonda's bully of a father (indomitable Donald Crisp) has the marriage annulled after just one day, a distraught Davis runs off, not knowing she and Fonda have conceived a child. When the lovers are finally reunited years later, Fonda has been married to a woman of his own social standing (radiant Anita Louise). The new wife, confined to a wheelchair following a car accident (the result of Fonda's reckless drinking), shows not a shred of bitterness toward her husband and, in fact, pleads with Davis to assume her role as Fonda's wife since the wife herself is unable to give Fonda the child he has always wanted. What Davis does next will come as no surprise to fans of this sort of tripe but Davis, cast against type as a self-sacrificing mother, is vibrantly warm and pretty and her performance surprisingly free of artifice.

With a title that wouldn't seem out of place in a Harlequin Romance, THAT CERTAIN WOMAN is Edmund Goulding's ultra-soap opera of the weepiest kind. The story of the super self-reliant Mary Donnell, a former bootlegger's wife turned attorney's faithful and efficient secretary. It seems that they might be engaged in something a little over-the-sweater, or maybe he likes her too much and she's just too good to say no, but the Hays Code filtered any naughty-naughty. Where Mary should have been more independent, she's now this saint dressed in self-sacrifice so extreme it gave me a headache at times and made me think Bette's equally self-sacrificing character in ALL THIS AND HEAVEN TOO was closer to Mike Tyson fighting Evander Holyfield. Translation: she made that character fierce in comparison. In short -- Mary Donnell, while is totally and absolutely in love with her boss' client's son Jack Merrick (Henry Fonda, a bit colorless), is unable to fight Jack's mean old father who doesn't want Her in the way. She is, in fact, the quintessential "telenovela" heroine: good to the nth degree, noble to ridiculous levels, passive to the point that you want to smack her like a piñata and see if you get a reaction, sad, and able to bend over backwards farther than Linda Blair doing her spider-walk in order to let things happen, even if it means letting go of her son and even leaving the country. Not that this is a bad thing: it's kept the romance genre alive and well and thriving in newsstands and drugstores alike, but to make a full-length movie out of this without some degree of irony is a bit much. I would have wanted something to happen, let's say, that a monkey-wrench be thrown in for good measure, but bah, this is soap, sap, and sugar down to the bitter end.