Tedfoldol everything you have heard about this movie is true.

Grimossfer Clever and entertaining enough to recommend even to members of the 1%

Patience Watson One of those movie experiences that is so good it makes you realize you've been grading everything else on a curve.

Hayleigh Joseph This is ultimately a movie about the very bad things that can happen when we don't address our unease, when we just try to brush it off, whether that's to fit in or to preserve our self-image.

dukeakasmudge Here's the way I see things..... Norma Shearer's character Jan falls in love with a gangster played by you know who even though she's going out with a nice guy.The gangster is something exciting while the nice guy is quickly forgotten.What girl wouldn't want to be in constant danger of being shot at instead of horseback rides on the beach? Daddy, who's a lawyer & alcoholic, was OK with the gangster (Hey he's bringing in business, right?) until he found out the gangster is going out with his daughter.Now there's a problem & this causes a rift in the once tight bond between father & daughter, her family as well.Eventually the daughter realizes her & the gangster's relationship is going nowhere & he realizes that she's never going to publicly acknowledge their relationship (She always sneaking in the backdoor to see him) She sees what a mistake shes made & that she was actually better off with the nice guy.The gangster let's her know he's never, NEVER going anywhere & in steps the nice guy to save her from the gangster.BOOM.Now they go & find her father who was doing well but slipped & fell off the wagon a little ways back & hopped a train to ??? to bring him back to try & help the nice guy beat the case.THE END.I wasn't into this movie as much I hoped or thought I would be.It was just something to sit back & watch.I think I might have dozed off once or twice & had to rewind it back.Go ahead & give A Free Soul a shot.You'll probably enjoy it more than I did

sol **SPOILERS** It's when San Francisco defense attorney Stephen Ash, Lionel Barrymore, had his free spirited daughter Jan, Norma Shearer, come with him to the courthouse where he was in the process of arguing a murder case that things turned sour for him Jan as well as her fiancée the cultured genteel and sensitive Dwight Winthrop, Leslie Howard.Pulling a rabbit out of his hat Ash, in the O. J Simpson style it don't fit you must acquit, proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that his client notorious SF gangster Ace Wilfong, Clark Gable, is innocent of gunning down a man in front of some half dozen witnesses! It was the handsome and sure of himself Wilfong who stole Ash's daughter's heart and in no time at all she broke off her engagement with a heart-broken Dwight to become Wilfong's personal squeeze and gun moll.This affair between his daughter Jan and the sneering and murderous Wilfong drives Ash, who had earlier saved Wilfong's neck from the San Quentin gallows, to hit the bottle to the point where he becomes too drunk to do his job as a defense attorney! It also has both him and Jan disowned by their family the wealthy and socially registered, the cream California's elite, Ash's who want nothing to do with them. Seeing what her affair had done to both her and her now helplessly drunk father Jan makes a deal with him that if he stops boozing she'll cut Ace Wilfong out of her life forever! Taking a three month vacation in the Northern California mountains both Jan and her dad stick to their commitments until the booze, or lack of it, get to old man Ash's dried out, in lacking the stuff, brain. Hitting the bottle harder then ever Ash drops out of sight until the last 15 or so minutes of the film. And what a amazing turnaround Ash makes with what little time that he still had left! ***SPOILERS*** Jan now destroyed over her father's non stop drinking binges goes back to Wilfong who treats her like a doormat for daring to leave him. Dwight who was out of the picture all that time comes back into Jan's life trying to get her away from Wilfong who's in the process of manhandling her into marrying him. In a final effort to prevent the marriage between Jan and Wilfong from taking place Dwight make the ultimate sacrifice by putting his life on San Quentin's death row by blasting a surprised Wilfong in the San Francisco office of the illegal casino that he runs! With Ash's good friend Eddie, James Gleason,tracking him down in a skid row flophouse on he San Francisco waterfront he's sobers himself up to take the case, without him knowing about it, of the indited for first degree murder Dwight Winthrop. That despite Dwight being more then willing to die, by being hanged, for freely doing what he believed in: Killing Ace Wilfong to prevent him from marrying Jan!In what has to be one of the most electrifying courtroom performance in movie history a barley sober and on the brink of death, from what the booze did to his heart liver and kidneys, Stephen Ash in his noble attempt to save Dwight's life bares his troubled and tortured soul to a shocked jury and a packed and standing room only courtroom in how he and only he was responsible for Wilfong's death in not being the father he should have been to his daughter Jan! It took everything out of him but in the end Ash's heart-felt and tearful summation did in fact save Dwight from the gallows but the poor man, with his weak heart finally giving out from the abused of his boozing, wasn't around to see it!

Joseph Brando Very entertaining pre-code flick from 1931 has lovely Shearer as the "free soul" flapper daughter of an alcoholic lawyer, played by Barrymore. They have a very close, but unusual father-daughter relationship, where she ignores his boozing and he ignores her wild lifestyle...until she falls for Gable, who plays a gangster being defended by her father, for whom she shuns the love of the "the nice guy" played by Howard. Gable really chews up playing the poker-faced bad guy and Barrymore is completely over-the-top, especially in the final courtroom showdown. Lucy Beaumont also turns up as (what else) the grandmother and its always nice to see her. A captivating oldie with some racy scenes and situations for the time.

laddie5 Yeah, yeah, it's Gable and Howard 8 years before Gone With the Wind, and even then the former makes the latter look like a eunuch. A number of posters seem flummoxed by this little coincidence and by the early-talkie theatricality of this movie. But for its time it really moves and breathes, particularly in the impressive scenes of Norma Shearer and Lionel Barrymore camping in the Sierras, trying and failing to leave their addictions behind and repair their broken relationship.Technically, this movie may be primitive, but in terms of content and meaning you couldn't get it made today: it's the story of a woman who uses a thug only for her own sexual pleasure, and the baffled and violent way the men in her life react. All three of them are outwardly brilliant and successful -- the lawyer, the gangster, and the rich polo player -- but have their vanity and weakness exposed when confronted with a powerful woman making her own choices. Some of the quieter moments of this movie are pretty devastating.p.s. strange how the myth that Gable "slaps" Shearer persists... are people really watching this movie? He shoves her back onto a couch twice, and that's it. The real violence is what she does to him by treating him as a boy toy.