Tallulah Bankhead was 29 when she made "The Cheat," in 1931, and she came to film after a successful theatrical career. Thirteen years later, she made Lifeboat and looked as if she had aged 30 years in 13.

Bankhead plays Elsa, the adored wife of Jeffrey (Harvey Stephens). She's a compulsive gambler and winds up owing $10,000 (the equivalent of $140,000 in today's money). A man who is obviously after her, Hardy Livingstone (Irving Pichel) gets her the money, but of course he wants payment -- the only kind of payment acceptable from a woman in precode! This is kind of a wild movie which could have been wilder with better casting. Tallulah's supporting cast just didn't cut it. To play the sadistic Livingstone, I would have preferred someone who had a little more bite to him, and Harvey Stephens is plain vanilla. Someone suggested Robert Montgomery for the husband and Charles Laughton for the lecher. I'm not sure she would have gone as far as she did with someone like Charles Laughton. Maybe Cyril Ritchard? Warren William? Tallulah's acting and glamor makes the film interesting to watch, and you'll love the Chinese costume Livingstone gives her to wear for a benefit.

This film was directed by the great Broadway director, George Abbott, who died in 1995 at the age of 107. He's the reason, I think, that this film moves so well, unlike many films of this era where people tend to talk more slowly and the action seems to drag as people get used to sound.

American Tallulah Bankhead, the sensation of the London stage, signed with Paramount Pictures in 1931 and her first talkie, TARNISHED LADY (1931),a Pre-code exposé of love among Manhattan's smart set, wasn't bad but didn't exactly set the world on fire. For her next, Paramount's front office decided to dust off the 1915 Cecil B. De Mille blockbuster THE CHEAT in the hopes that it would do for Tallulah what it did for Fannie Ward and Pola Negri. Negri made her American debut in the 1923 re-make of this Victorian-era cautionary tale of the price of deceit and the public lapped it up. Like her first, Tallulah's second film had Gotham as it's setting but was a bit darker in theme. The sexy sadism of THE CHEAT puts it in the realm of pulp fiction. A wealthy young couple, Jeffrey (Harvey Stephens) and Elsa (Tallulah Bankhead) Carlyle , are brought to the brink of ruin by the wife's selfish recklessness. While at their Long Island yacht club, Elsa is ogled by Hardy Livingstone (Irving Pichel),a lascivious roué just returned from an extended stay in the Orient. Unbeknownst to her husband, Elsa loses big at the gaming tables and wanders down to the dock where Livingstone follows and asks if she'd like to see his estate. She accepts but, incredibly, she's shocked when he makes a pass. Livingstone is hell-bent on having her and from here on her life starts to spin wildly out of control. Despite the gossip and the pleading of her trusting and blindly adoring husband, Elsa continues to tempt fate by (innocently) associating with Livingstone. Entrusted with the Milk Fund Ball's money, Elsa secretly risks it all for a sure bet on the stock market. She loses and, backed into a corner, takes money offered by Livingstone ...on the condition she come to him one night soon. On the very night the repayment is due, her husband's business acumen makes them rich and she goes to Livingstone with a check but he refuses the money. Calling her a cheat he brands her breast and she shoots and wounds him. Her husband takes the blame but during a climactic court-room scene Elsa reveals the truth and the authorities hustle Livingstone off before an angry mob can get to him. Elsa, now a changed woman, realizes the error of her ways and Jeffrey, still hopelessly in love, tells her to consider the whole thing only a bad dream.

De Mille's 1915 version of THE CHEAT could have worked in Pre-Code Hollywood. In the original, the sizzling flesh-branding was only metaphor for brutal rape and miscegenation. In 1931 Paramount could have dispensed with metaphor. They didn't, possibly because they felt the paying public wanted to see it as originally written. In the original the villain was a devilishly handsome but fiendish Oriental (Sessue Hayakawa) while here he's a jaded American who picked up a few tricks in the Far East. His incredibly ornate mansion has a statue of Yama, the God of Destruction and a curio cabinet that holds figurines made in the images of the women he's had. The socialite in the original (Fannie Ward) was played as a flighty air-head and it worked. Tallulah, too cosmopolitan for that, played Elsa as self-destructive and slightly unbalanced ...and that worked even better. At one point she admits to her husband she's mad but amends it to "mad about living". Bankhead took a role others had branded as their's and put her own spin on it, giving Elsa real depth. The emotions that flit across her face as she loses at cards and the stock-market convey a woman who has no conception of cause and effect. Pampered, sheltered and spoiled by her husband, Elsa is genuinely surprised when she finds she can't wrap Livingstone around her little finger. She flinches when she sees the statue of Yama ...as if recognizing something in herself. The branding iron scene is still potent and there's an amazing image of Elsa standing dazed with smoking gun and smoking breast. The courtroom scene is where she really gives it all she's got. Coming clean for the first time in her life and realizing the chaos she's caused, her eyes and voice convey rising hysteria. As she rips her bodice open to reveal the brand on her breast (in the 1915 version it was her back) the crowd goes crazy and riots. The ending of the original is a bit more powerful and probably should have been kept. In that one, the crowd tears the villain apart in a savage lynching, but here the police (barely) save him.

Filmed at Paramount East in Astoria, New York, THE CHEAT is opulent and extravagant despite a minimum of sets. A few mansions and the yacht club manage to convey the insulated world of the wealthy. This topic was endlessly fascinating to Depression-era audiences with the Crash of 1929 still fresh in their collective mind. The weak links here are Tallulah's co-stars. There aren't any to speak of, so perhaps Paramount felt Bankhead's name on the marquee was sufficient. Second-stringer Irving Pichel didn't (or couldn't) portray a menacing sexual sadist hiding under a cloak of respectability. This role cried out for a Charles Laughton. The young husband, Harvey Stephens, was fair-to-middling, but someone like Robert Montgomery would have given the role the naiveté and boyishness required. Bankhead actually comes through for the studio and also photographed beautifully. She's got gorgeous gams and titillates with her décolleté gowns, satin robes and slips. At one point she's outrageously garbed as a Siamese Princess for the Oriental-themed Milk Fund Ball. Tallulah would eventually star opposite Charles Laughton and Robert Mongomery respectively in her two final (and best) films before leaving Hollywood in 1932.

I found this film quite absorbing with a showy performance by Bankhead. She plays the "out-of-control" wife of a loving and up-standing young man (Harvey Stephens). Her gambling debts get her in hock with an untrustworthy admirer (Irving Pichel). Pichel's penchant for the more bizarre aspects of Oriental culture colors his and Tallulah's relationship into multiple arms of scandal. There is a great climax court room scene wherein Bankhead hams it up wonderfully. I'll say nothing more than that "sizzling flesh" is involved here. It must be seen to be believed. The photography and direction is nicely done and for a 1931 film everything moves along quite admirably.