Ladies of Leisure was Barbara Stanwyck's first film with Frank Capra, who writes (in The Name Above the Title): “A new star was born.... Underneath her sullen shyness smoldered the emotional fires of a young Duse or Bernhardt. Naive, unsophisticated, caring nothing about make-up, clothes, or hairdos, this chorus girl could grab your heart and tear it to pieces. She knew nothing about camera tricks.... She just turned it on--and everything else on the stage stopped.”
Stanwyck plays a role she was later to perfect, if not epitomize: the wisecracking adventuress, gold-digger par excellence who suffers for her sins when faced with true love. In Ladies of Leisure, she inserts herself among the yachting crowd. When asked to pose for a portrait by a society artist (Ralph Graves), she begins to reveal her softer side. But the artist's family and fiancée will have nothing of that. Woman overboard!
A clever script (allowing for Lowell Sherman's highly verbal drunk) marks this transition film from the silents to sound. But William K. Everson notes that “at the half-way mark, the film decides to be an updated Camille--from then on it moves in a filmic way...the climactic sequence is genuinely tense, exciting and visual in the manner of the best silents....”