The Lady Lies is a weird, clunky look at why children are the worst

You should probably watch The Lady Lies if you have a soft spot for the absolute chaos of early sound movies. It is definitely worth a look if you want to see Claudette Colbert before she became a massive star, back when she still had that slightly nervous energy on camera.

If you hate movies that feel like a filmed stage play where nobody knows where to stand, you will probably hate this. It is stiff as a board and the audio sounds like it was recorded inside a tin can at the bottom of a well.

The whole thing centers on Walter Huston, who plays Robert, a rich widower with a mustache that looks like it requires its own zip code. He is lonely, so he starts seeing Joyce (Colbert), who works in a shop and is—heaven forbid—not part of the high-society crowd.

His kids, Bobbie and Jo, find out about the affair and they are... well, they are monsters. I don’t mean they are evil, they are just so incredibly snooty and stuck-up that you kind of want to reach into the screen and give them a stern talking to. 🙄

They act like they are forty-year-old tax attorneys instead of teenagers. It is one of those weird things in older movies where children are written like tiny, judgmental aristocrats who have never seen a toy in their lives.

There is this one scene where they basically interrogate Joyce to see if she is 'worthy' of their father. It is meant to be dramatic, but it just feels incredibly awkward because of how the actors have to stand perfectly still so the microphones can pick them up.

You can actually hear the hiss of the background noise get louder whenever someone starts talking. It’s a bit distracting, but after twenty minutes, your ears just kind of tune it out, I guess.

Claudette Colbert is easily the best thing here. She has this way of looking at Huston that feels actually real, even when the dialogue is clunky and sounds like it was translated from a Victorian greeting card.

She doesn't do that over-the-top silent movie acting that some of the others are still clinging to. She just feels like a person, which is rare for 1929.

Walter Huston is fine, but he spends a lot of time looking vaguely confused. Maybe he was just trying to remember where the microphone was hidden in the flower vase. 💐

I noticed a small detail in the lawyer's office—the way the papers are stacked so perfectly it looks like they were glued together. Nobody's desk is ever that clean, especially not a busy attorney who is supposedly dealing with scandals.

The friend, Charlie Ruggles, shows up to provide some comic relief. He is okay, but his jokes are very '1920s dry,' which means I didn't really laugh, but I understood that a joke had occurred.

It reminds me a bit of the vibe in Pretty Mrs. Smith, though that one is a bit more lighthearted. Or even A Self-Made Widow in terms of how it handles the whole 'woman in a tough spot' trope.

The movie gets way more interesting when the kids are off-screen. Whenever they come back on, the energy just drops because they are so busy being offended by everything.

There is a moment where the daughter looks at a piece of jewelry and the camera lingers on her face for about five seconds too long. You can tell the director was like, 'Okay, now look sad... keep looking sad... okay, we got it.'

I wonder if people back then actually talked like this. Everything is so 'thee' and 'thou' and 'I shall not permit it,' even when they are just talking about dinner.

The sets are huge and empty-looking. It feels like they built these massive rooms but forgot to put any actual stuff in them, so everyone just stands in the middle of a giant carpeted void.

It’s not as fast-paced as something like The Quarterback. It really takes its time, which is a nice way of saying it drags in the middle when they start talking about family honor for the tenth time.

I found myself looking at the background extras in the shop scene. One lady in the back is just holding a hat and staring directly at the lens for a split second before she realizes she's on camera. It’s those little mistakes that make these old movies feel more alive to me.

The ending is... well, it’s a 1929 ending. It happens very fast and suddenly everyone is happy, even though the kids were basically psychological terrorists for the last hour. 🤷‍♂️

I don't think I've ever seen a movie where I rooted against the children so hard. Usually, you're supposed to want the family to stay together, but I kind of wanted Robert to just move to a different city and leave them the house.

If you've seen The Charming Deceiver, you know how these plots usually go. There is always some big secret or a lie that complicates things, hence the title.

Is the lady lying? I mean, sort of, but mostly she’s just trying to survive a bunch of rich people being weird. The 'lie' feels like a bit of a stretch to justify the drama.

It's fascinating to see how they handled 'lower class' characters back then. They make her seem so noble for having a job, like it’s some kind of exotic hobby she picked up.

I keep thinking about the sound of the shoes. Every time someone walks across the floor, it sounds like they are wearing wooden clogs on a hollow stage. Thump, thump, thump.

There’s a bit of a tangent I want to go on about the fashion. The hats in this movie are aggressive. They look like they could double as satellite dishes or weapons of self-defense.

Anyway, it’s a decent enough way to spend eighty minutes if you're a film nerd. It’s not a masterpiece, and it’s definitely not as polished as The Golden Lotus, but it has a specific charm.

You can feel the movie trying to be a 'serious drama' while the technology is actively fighting against it. That struggle is more interesting to me than the actual plot about the lawyer and the shop girl.

Sometimes the camera just pans across the room for no reason. It’s like the cinematographer just discovered the camera could move and decided to show off, even if nothing was happening on the other side of the room.

I'll probably forget the plot of this in a week, but I'll remember the look on the kids' faces when they realized their dad had a life. Pure, unadulterated snobbery. 😒

It's a weird artifact. It's clunky and the pacing is all over the place, but Colbert makes it work just by being there.

Just don't expect a lot of action or anything. It’s mostly people sitting on sofas looking very concerned about their social standing.