Frank Capra was the first director to capture the seemingly raw emotionalism of young Barbara Stanwyck in this pre-Production Code melodrama of sexual and class relations. She 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. Inserting herself among the yachting crowd in Ladies of Leisure she agrees to pose for a portrait by a society artist (Ralph Graves) and begins to show her softer side to him. But the artist's family and fiancée will have none of that. “Ostensibly Ladies of Leisure recounts Stanwyck's moral growth from party girl...to suitable matrimonial material.... As played, however, with Graves typically dim and Stanwyck keenly knowing, the film holds one of those fascinating proto-feminist cautionary tales about women who let themselves be ‘redressed' by men--of which Vertigo and Stanwyck's own performance in Stella Dallas provide the key texts” (Scott Simmon, Library of Congress). Jo Swerling's clever script (allowing for Lowell Sherman's highly verbal drunk) marks this transition transition sound film which still moves in the filmic, visual manner of the best silents.