This is a great pre-code, unseen for decades and tied up in rights problems until TCM rode to the rescue and cleared matters up in 2007. Now TCM owns the rights to this and five other films that were in the same boat. There is just something about it that I never tire of, although there is nothing particularly unique about the plot.<br /><br />Ann Harding plays Joan, the oldest of two sisters and the daughter of a man who is still wealthy but has been hit hard by the depression. The film opens on the family shopping for younger daughter Valerie's wedding trousseau. Valerie's champagne tastes are having difficulties adjusting to a cheaper brand, and one gets the feeling that she's used to being pampered by both Joan and her father. This fact figures in prominently later on in the plot. Afterward, Joan runs into John Fletcher (William Powell), heir to the Fletcher shipping line. After a couple of casual dates, Joan decides that John would make a good husband. The bottom line looks good - there's only one problem. John is a confirmed bachelor. Joan decides to take the intensity of her quest up a notch. She begins sleeping with John and, with the help of her sister, arranges to have her father call on John and find her in his apartment dressed only in lounging pajamas. Chivalry will demand that John marry her and so will her father.<br /><br />Things work out as Joan planned up to a point. John agrees to marry Joan, but wants it understood that there will be a divorce after a respectable amount of time has passed - six months. In the meantime, Joan's business-like attitude towards the marriage has been ruined by the fact that she now loves John and only has six months to get him to feel the same way without trying so hard that John can see that she is trying to get him to love her.<br /><br />This movie has some great precode moments as well as the always dapper William Powell and the regal bearing of Ann Harding at her very best. In spite of the rather dramatic and heavy sounding plot I've described, it also has some great comic moments. The best of these is near the end of the film when Joan has to pull off a dinner party for some of John's potential clients without having them know about the mayhem going on behind the scenes, yet she is thwarted quite hilariously at every turn.<br /><br />Highly recommended for fans of precode cinema.