Women's Paradise (1936) review - Cabbage hats and Austrian angst

If you love dusty, old-school European dramas with lots of fancy coats and awkward lingering glances, Women's Paradise is a neat little find. But if you hate slow plots where people just argue about money in posh rooms, you should probably skip this one. 💸

The whole setup is pretty simple. This young lady works at a struggling Vienna dress shop and needs to save it from going under.

So, what does she do? She goes to ask this rich guy for a loan, even though they have some really messy history together.

I kept thinking about how much this feels like those silent era comedies, like Should Men Walk Home?, but with way more dramatic sighing. Everyone looks like they are about to faint from the stress of retail.

The rich guy has this incredibly punchable face when he first refuses her. You just want to shake him by his fancy lapels.

The Good Stuff (And the Weird Stuff)

There is this one scene where a mannequin in the background is wearing a hat that looks exactly like a giant cabbage. I honestly couldn't stop staring at it for the entire scene. 🥬

The dress shop itself looks incredibly cramped. You can almost smell the old fabric and the dust motes floating in the hot studio lights.

The movie gets much better once they stop talking about bank accounts and start doing these weirdly long fashion show sequences. The pacing just dies, but the clothes are neat.

Seriously, we get like five minutes of women walking in circles wearing coats that look extremely heavy. It is like a proto-Instagram feed but with more wool.

It reminds me a bit of the lighthearted relationship stuff in Just Married, but with more Austrian angst. The characters seem to love being miserable.

There is a moment where a character drops a teacup and the camera just... stays on the broken pieces on the floor for ten seconds. Why did they edit it like that?

Maybe the camera guy fell asleep. Or maybe it was supposed to be symbolic or something deep. ☕

The acting is very theatrical, lots of hand-to-forehead gasping. Hella Kolniak has these giant eyes that do most of the heavy lifting when the dialogue gets boring.

Sometimes the sound design makes the silence feel super awkward. You can hear the actors breathing and it makes you want to cough.

But there is a charm to how cheap some of the sets look behind the fancy dresses. You can tell they spent all the budget on the silk.

It is definitely not a masterpiece, but it is a fun piece of weird history. If you have an hour and a half to spare and want to see some vintage Austrian knitwear, give it a go.