In what William K. Everson characterizes as a “stark, Warner-Brothers type of sex and confession melodrama, but done with the glossier, ladies' magazine approach prevalent at Paramount,” Claudette Colbert rises from abandoned unwed mother to small-time performer to the lap of luxury as a chanteuse in an expensive night club. But it's work all the way, and even at the top, Everson notes, “Ricardo Cortez constantly harasses (her) by rasping ‘But you're a torch singer!' as though she were even lower on the social scale than those two perennial victims of the Hollywood caste system, the whore and the schoolteacher.” At a recent revival at Cinecon 20, Torch Singer was called “one of Claudette Colbert's best films of the 1930s, and one of the least shown. The film is dominated by Colbert's tour-de-force performance.... She does all her own singing, and one of the songs, ‘Give Me Liberty or Give Me Love' became quite a big hit. Especially well-photographed by Karl Struss; and Claudette looks sensational (in) some of the tightest (and most pre-Production Code) gowns of 1933!”