Bad Girl (1931)

I don't know that honesty is always the best policy, but I think that this melodrama might have gone much more smoothly for the married "Dorothy" (Sally Eilers) and "Eddie" (James Dunn) if they, especially the latter, had just been a little more upfront with the other. She basically thinks all men are predatory wastrels; he that women just want to shop their way trough life. Despite these obvious misgivings, and because he treats her with almost as much disinterest as she does him, the pair start to quite like each other. She's got a brother who is a controlling pain in the neck, so they come up with a plan to get her married so she's out of his ambit. Swiftly, with a baby looming, he loses his job and desperate times call for desperate measures - all against a tapestry of mistrust and scepticism! There are times when I just wanted to bang their heads together and I took that as a sign that they were all doing their jobs properly. Dunn delivers quite engagingly, especially as the film progresses and his character's inability to simply be honest and less priggish just worsens his problems. It takes a while to get going, but once the dynamic is laid out for us, then this is quite an amiably presented look at the stupidity of human nature and of the breadwinning custom and is well worth ninety minutes - though maybe not if you're headed to a maternity ward anytime soon.