Mandalay (1934)

In Rangoon, a Russian refugee is abandoned by her lover who sells her to a cabaret of which she is made the hostess by its owner.

The milieu is practically the same as in The White Countess, but storywise it has little in common with that film. It' hard to separate, in Mandalay, the genuinely honest depiction of human relatioships and emotions, from sensationalist melodrama. One could perhaps chance a generalization about pre-code cinema, saying that the freedom under which it was made entailed these two different outcomes: frankness and the abuse of cheap thrills. Mandalay's main feminine character starts out as someone we are willing to sympathize with, and ends as a monster and a martyr, improbable at both counts. There is a core of truth which persists throughout the film, though, sometimes belying the plot itself, and this makes it a marginally fascinating film.
(Number 9 in critic Dale Thomajan's top ten list for 1934.)

Rating: 58