Shopworn (1932) Review - Stanwyck is too good for this nonsense

If you have seventy minutes to spare and want to see Barbara Stanwyck absolutely terrify some high-society snobs, yes, Shopworn is 100% worth your time. Pre-code fans will eat this up. But if you cannot stand old-school melodrama where characters make life-altering decisions based on a single misunderstanding, you will probably want to throw your shoe at the screen.

I watched this late last night and kept thinking about how Stanwyck basically carries the entire plot on her back. She plays Kitty, a girl from the wrong side of the tracks who works at a greasy spoon. She falls for a rich boy named Tony, played by Regis Toomey, who has the personality of a wet piece of toast.

Tony's mother is the real villain here. Played by Maude Turner Gordon, she wears these absurdly massive hats and looks like she smells something terrible whenever Kitty is in the room. She literally gets Kitty thrown into a reformatory just to keep her away from her precious son. It is completely insane and makes zero sense legally, but hey, that's 1932 for you.

"You think because you have money you can buy anything!" Kitty screams at one point, and man, you can feel the spit flying off the screen.

Stanwyck has this way of looking at people like she wants to bite their nose off. It is great. Even when the script gets incredibly silly, her anger feels totally real.

The Weird Transition

After getting out of the reformatory, Kitty doesn't just go back to waitressing. No, she somehow becomes a massive Broadway star. We see this through a montage of theatre marquees, which is a classic lazy movie trick. Suddenly she is wearing fancy furs and holding a cigarette holder like she was born to it. But she still has that Brooklyn grit underneath.

There is a scene where Tony comes back into her life after she is famous. He looks so small next to her. Honestly, I kept wishing Kitty would just hook up with someone else, maybe a tough guy from one of those other gritty dramas of the era, like Scrap Iron. Tony just stands there looking sad while his mom does all the dirty work.

Some of the dialogue is so clunky it made me laugh out loud. At one point, a character says something like, "Your love is a cheap thing!" without a hint of irony. But the movie moves so fast you don't have time to get bored. It is like a roller coaster that is slightly off its tracks.

• Best moment: When Stanwyck confronts the mother in the dressing room and just tears her a new one.
• Worst moment: Every time Regis Toomey tries to look romantic.
• Odd detail: There is a background extra in the restaurant scene who is eating soup so aggressively I couldn't look at anything else.

If you have seen other obscure dramas from this era, like Shanghai Rose, you know how these cheap melodramas usually go. They can get pretty dusty. But Shopworn has a pulse, and that pulse is entirely Stanwyck's raw energy. 🍿

Is it a masterpiece? No way. But it is a blast to watch her refuse to be stepped on.