White Woman (1933, Carole Lombard, Charles Laughton, Charles Bickford, Kent Taylor) – Classic Movie Review 10,747

Director Stuart Walker’s infamous 1933 American pre-Code black and white Paramount Pictures drama film White Woman stars Charles Laughton, Carole Lombard, Kent Taylor and Charles Bickford.

Lombard plays nightclub singer Judith Denning, a young widow whose husband committed suicide, forcing her to make a living singing in an unrespectable native café. Judith remarries and accompanies her rich new husband Horace H Prin (Laughton) to his remote jungle rubber plantation estate in Malaysia, but finds he is cruel and jealous, though perhaps rightly so when Judith and the plantation’s overseer develop a mutual attraction.

There are two terribly wasted talents in this silly tale of a Londoner (played by famous Yorkshireman Charles Laughton) in the tropics taking a local songstress floozie as his wife. It is perhaps not that unusual to see Carole Lombard miscast in a bit of a stinker, but somehow it seems a shame to see an actor of the stature of Laughton be sunk to such depths. This was released in the same year that his Oscar-winning portrayal of Henry VIII made it to celluloid in The Private Life of Henry VIII, winning him the 1934 Best Actor Oscar. Here he is miscast and overacts dreadfully. Even the solid support from the reliable old stalwart actors cannot save this turkey.

The screenplay by Samuel Hoffenstein, Gladys Lehman and Jane Loring is based on the Broadway play Hangman’s Whip by Norman Reilly Raine and Frank Butler.

Also in the cast are Kent Taylor, Charles Bickford, Percy Kilbride, Charles B Middleton, James Bell, Claude King, Ethel Griffies, Jimmie Dime, Noble Johnson, Marc Lawrence, Tetsu Komai, Victor Wong and Gregg Whitespear.

Paramount Pictures remade the film, wisely much altered, in 1939 as Island of Lost Men, with Anna May Wong, J Carrol Naish and Broderick Crawford in the roles originated by Lombard, Laughton and Bickford.

© Derek Winnert 2021 Classic Movie Review 10,747

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