Forgotten Women (1931) review - A messy, honest look at old Hollywood

You should definitely watch this if you have a soft spot for pre-code dramas that don't try to sugarcoat things too much. If you hate scratchy audio or movies where people stand very still to talk into a hidden microphone, you'll probably want to skip it.

It’s a movie about the movie business, which usually feels like a big pat on the back, but this one feels more like a warning. 🎬

Marion Shilling is the lead and she has this incredibly expressive face that seems to get smaller whenever she gets bad news. There is a scene early on where she's just looking at a casting office door, and you can see the exact moment she realizes she’s just one of a hundred girls who look exactly like her.

The pacing is a bit all over the place, honestly. One minute they are at a party and the next someone is having a full-blown life crisis in a tiny apartment.

I loved Beryl Mercer in this. She plays the kind of mother figure who is so sweet it almost hurts, but you can tell she's seen it all before. 👵

Cinematic perspective: Exploring the visual vocabulary of Forgotten Women (1931) through its definitive frames.

The movie doesn't have the high-speed energy of something like The Hayseeds Come to Sydney, but it has a weird, quiet sadness to it. It’s less about the 'triumphs' mentioned in the plot summary and much more about the heartaches.

There is this one guy, Eddie Kane, who plays a director or a manager type. He has this pencil-thin mustache that makes him look like he’s constantly vibrating with suspicious energy.

One thing that stuck out to me was how the sets felt. Usually, old movies look like grand palaces, but the boarding house here looks actually cramped. You can almost feel the dust on the curtains in the background of the shots.

The dialogue is a bit clunky in spots, probably because Wellyn Totman and Adele Buffington were still figuring out how to write for 'talkies.' Some lines feel like they were written for a silent movie title card and then just spoken out loud, which makes for some awkward pauses.

I found myself thinking about Rolling Home while watching this, mostly because both movies feel like they were made by people who really understood what it’s like to be down on your luck. 📉

Cinematic perspective: Exploring the visual vocabulary of Forgotten Women (1931) through its definitive frames.

There’s a strange moment where a character gets a job offer and the camera just lingers on a telephone for what feels like a full minute. It’s supposed to be tense, but it just made me wonder if the actor forgot their cue.

Carmelita Geraghty is great too, but she doesn't get nearly enough to do. She has this spark that the movie kind of wastes by keeping her in the background of most scenes.

It’s not a masterpiece, and the ending feels like it was tacked on because someone decided the audience needed a 'win.' But for the first hour, it’s a pretty gritty look at how the industry chews people up. 🎞️

If you’ve ever seen something like Angoisse, you know how these old melodramas can get a bit heavy-handed. Forgotten Women is definitely guilty of that, especially during the big emotional speeches.

Still, it’s worth a look for the fashion alone. The hats in this movie are absolutely ridiculous in the best way possible. I spent at least five minutes just staring at a sequence where three women are wearing what look like silk pancakes on their heads.

Didja notice how many people are smoking in every single frame? It’s a miracle the film stock didn't just ignite right there in the camera.

Overall, it's a decent watch on a rainy Sunday. It’s not gonna change your life, but it’s a nice little time capsule of a Hollywood that doesn't exist anymore.