Ehirerapp Waste of time

AnhartLinkin This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

AshUnow This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Fleur Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

The_Film_Cricket Ah, pre-code Jean Harlow, what a gift. I've studied her very short career and I much preferred her earlier work playing strumpets instead of the later attempts to make her a leading lady. Red-Headed Woman is her best film because she simply pulls no punches.Based on the book by Katherine Brush and adapted by Anita Loos, Red-Headed Woman finds the usually blonde Harlow playing carrot-topped Lil Andrews a happy, mischievous gold-digger who's hours of enjoyment come from withering the inhibition of married men. It is all an effort to climb the social ladder, of course, and she won't stop until she gets there. That's why she hooks up with Bill (Chester Morris), her boss, a happily married man who is passionately in love with his wife Irene (Leila Hyams) but who can't help himself when Lil throws herself into his arms. She convinces Bill to divorce Irene, not because she loves him but because it will get her in with the "in crowd". But Bill's society friends don't feel the need to associate with a tramp and Lil tires of her new husband and tries another target - his best friend Charles. He wants nothing to do with her but she marches ahead anyway and eventually he melts. Bill isn't so unhappy with the results because it gets Lil out of his hair and he can get down to the business of regrouping the shattered bits of his marriage to Irene.We understand what makes these men melt. We get that sense right from the beginning in a close-up of Harlow's gorgeous legs as she puts a tiny picture of Bill in her garter. She has a way with men by pushing herself against them. She doesn't lay back as an invitation, she thrusts herself upon her prey, kissing them and pressing herself against them like a predator. There's a look in her eyes and a tremble of her bottom lip, a turn of her hip that we sense she has worked to perfection. Her slight body, short stature and little girl voice suggest to her prey a woman who is naive and easily taken. She has a perfected way with men that makes even us in the audience tremble.There are not wounds to Lil, not shattered past that makes her this way. She's sexy, she likes and it and she likes what it does to men. Harlow displays such a joy at decimating a man's moral wall that for a while, we are happy to go along. We can't believe that these men would be such dopes but if you study her body language you can see the seductive power. Her performance is not that different from another gold-digger, the one played by Barbara Stanwyck a year later in a film called Baby Face. In that film, an equally trashy Stanwyck literally sexes her way from the gutter to the gold, seducing one man after another. But Stanwyck's Lily Powers had a reason for her machinations - she was trying to pull herself out of the gutter of prostitution provided by her no-good father. Harlow's character has no such reasoning, she just wants to get to the top because she has the organic tools to do so. She laughs at her seductive powers when they work but she gets vindictive when they don't.There is only one weakness in the film and that comes at the end. We meet up with Lil two years later at a horse track in Paris where she has taken a new lover and the film ends apparently (and abruptly) on the happy note that Lil's pursuits will continue. She has occupied our minds for two hours as such a destructive force that we want some sort of satisfaction and the film ends without a resolution. That doesn't speak to Harlow's performance just to some bad writing. Harlow's performance is an act of depraved giddiness but as the film goes along we begin to sympathize with those she is attempting to destroy. There comes a point at which every time she shows up in a doorway, we feel pity for anyone who tries to leave.

piedbeauty37 Enjoyable, often hilarious tale of on-the-make secretary Jean Harlow who sets her sights on the boss's son. She uses sex the way some people use bribery. Relentlessly pursuing Bill, (her first prey) Harlow intends to marry up and do it fast.Considering the prudishness of most 1940's films, this 1932 offering is pretty frank. There is lots of sex outside of marriage and adultery within it; Jean's character enjoys being bad and doesn't apologize for it.Harlow steamrolls her way through men, but will she get her come uppance. Watch this little gem and find out.

evanston_dad Jean Harlow plays a gold digger determined not to get stuck on the wrong side of the tracks and goes through men like tissues in an attempt to land a sugar daddy in "Red-Headed Woman."I've long since accepted that to watch a Jean Harlow movie you just simply have to agree to disagree with seemingly every moviegoer from the 1930s about Harlow's appeal. She was hot stuff back then, a fact that is nearly inexplicable to me now. In a role like this, when she's basically a slut, I can accept that men would want to have sex with her, despite the fact that she's actually quite ugly and uber-annoying to boot (ugh, that baby talk!) But that every man who comes across her would also want to dump his wife to marry her? That is pretty much impossible for me to get my head around.Though I will say that Harlow looks much more attractive with red hair than she does with that awful platinum blonde thing she sports in most of her movies. And while I don't find her remotely attractive, there is something about her that commands the screen."Red-Headed Woman" is not the raciest pre-Code movie I've seen, but it does manage to give a newbie some indication of how pre-Code movies were different from the ones that would be released in the couple of decades following. A movie made even five years later would never dream of letting Harlow's character get what she wants in the end without atoning for her sins first.Grade: B+

ametaphysicalshark Boy, don't ever show this movie to a feminist. While I don't think it qualifies as 'misogynist'- it does have two strong female characters, however wicked one of them is, the movie has a brazen sexuality which familiarity with old Hollywood films wouldn't really lead you to think would be present in a 1932 film, but then again this was pre-code. Plus, the whole movie is about a wicked seductress who preys on the natural weaknesses of men, and by the time our protagonist beats her up after she 'asks for it' any extreme feminists watching would probably be preparing banners demanding the film be erased from archives and campaign for 'womyn''s rights more fervently than ever.On the other hand, they might think Jean Harlow's character in the film is an example of a great, strong womyn. Take everything I've said so far with a grain of salt, I'm just having a bit of fun. Back to the film. It's really quite good. Not very good, not great, but quite good. It's a (very) darkly humorous movie with some fun pre-code naughtiness and a sort of sexuality American movies wouldn't really have for quite some time to come after the pre-code era.I suppose some of it is supposed to work as drama, but it's hard to feel sorry for anyone other than the male lead's wife who has her home wrecked by Harlow's character. It's pretty good comedy though, fairly well-written and while the whole movie is sleazy relative to the time period it was made in and modern audiences' preconceived notions about Hollywood films at the time (or at least those that have no experience with the pre-code films), it's all done with a sort of overall class which works in the movie's favor. It's well-directed and a good production too. I don't agree with most that Jean Harlow is even remotely attractive, nor that she's really even all that good here (some of the more comic bits she really doesn't pull off), but the film is pretty good entertainment, I'd recommend it to anyone interested in pre-code Hollywood or if it's on TCM late one night or something and you've got nothing better to do.