Review

This film will never be utilized as research for a gender study 101 class. It's unpleasant with both sexes coming off in negative ways. First of all there's professor Ray Milland who has written a book on why he feels that women secretly love being subjugated. Then there's reporter Teresa Wright who enrolls in his class, paid to basically goad him into hitting her by constantly hitting him over any little reason simply because her character claims she has a bad temper. Her boss, Brian Donlevy, wants to humiliate him by having a picture snapped of Milland slugging Wright. She doesn't like the assignment but still goes out of her way to follow orders, basically making her complicit to a set-up.

The best material in this goes to Iris Adrian as a burlesque dancer, and one of the few times where she is seen in dark hair. But the issue of the film is that the script is so lousy and filled with anger that any opportunity to make a statement that both genders are messed up and we just need to get on with it completely fails as is the message that violence is wrong no matter what the gender committing it. In smaller roles are Rose Hobart, Lloyd Bridges and Norma Varden. The fact that the script was co-written by Ruth McKenney ("My Sister Eileen") was a shock for me. Milland and Wright, both coming off of Oscar wins, are not served well by this which was shelved for a while and probably should have been just forgot rather than released. By pairing the two together romantically after the way it is set up destroys the film's impact even further. A mess on every level, and one of the worst films of the '40s.