Ladies They Talk About has everything you could want in a women-in-prison picture—catfights, fast talk, escape attempts, skin—plus Stanwyck swaggering around like she owns the place. She plays a gang moll who decides to be honest with a childhood friend, prosecutor and radio evangelist Preston Foster, and is rewarded with two to five at San Quentin. "This is a penitentiary, not a pink tea," says the matron, but you'd hardly know it: the inmates seem to spend most of their time gossiping, primping, and decorating their cells with pictures from fan magazines. (In a bizarre musical interlude, convict Lillian Roth serenades a pinup of Joe E. Brown.) True to the great early-thirties tradition, the movie packs an impressive amount of unlikely plot into its sixty-nine minutes, and its gestures toward morality are happily desultory—Stanwyck might be redeemed by the love of a good man, but she has to try to kill him first.

—Juliet Clark

• Written by Brown Holmes, William McGrath, Sidney Sutherland, from a play by Dorothy Mackaye, Carlton Miles. Photographed by John Seitz. With Barbara Stanwyck, Preston Foster, Dorothy Burgess, Lillian Roth. (69 mins, B&W, 35mm, From Warner Bros.)