The Woman in Red (1935)

(On Cable TV, July 2021) Liking classic films doesn’t mean giving a free pass to those with particularly idiotic plotting or lopsided structure. The main draw of The Woman in Red is easy to see: here’s Barbara Stanwyck getting a chance to play a character going through terrible events — a horse rider hobnobbing uneasily with the New England elite, with a cross-class marriage leading to further trouble and then, in the last half-hour of the film, a death that brings up even more trouble, especially when the characters become morons who won’t tell the truth. The Woman in Red feels like three movies smashed together, from romance to rich-person drama to murder/courtroom thriller. But maybe Stanwyck’s latter stature now gives the film too big a set of expectations to satisfy — in most other aspects, this feels like the kind of seat-warmer that Warner Brothers (like most other studios) churned out on a near-weekly basis throughout the 1930s. Stanwyck certainly elevates the material, but there’s only so much substance to elevate in The Woman in Red. It’s a rather disappointing part of her filmography, but not every film can be a triumph.