appears to allude to the nature of these women’s lives. It starts with jolly outdoor scenes, almost pastoral, but then descends into moody nightclub darkness, a world of metropolitan chic and brooding sensuality. I can only compare it to the nightmare in Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound.” Reception The film was commercially successful and was cited as one of the best of the year. Although it received no Academy Award nominations, many critics now describe it as one of the major films of what was a stellar year in Hollywood film production. The New York Times critic Frank Nugent praised the film with characteristic wit:"...(G)oing and coming to syrupy movies, we lose our sense of balance...Miss Boothe...has dipped her pen in venom. Metro, without alkalizing it too much, has fed it to a company of actresses who normally are so sweet that butter (as the man says) would not melt in their mouths. And, instead of gasping and clutching at their throats, the women—bless 'em—have downed it without blinking, have gone on a glorious cat-clawing rampage and have turned in one of the merriest pictures of the season...(Boothe's) sociological investigation of the scalpel-tongued Park Avenue set...is a ghoulish and disillusioning business, and the drama critics, when first they saw the play, turned away in chivalrous horror...Possibly some of that venom has been lost in the screen translation...The omissions are not terribly important, and some of the new sequences are so good Miss Boothe might have thought of them herself. ...The most heartening part of it all, though, aside from the pleasure we derive from hearing witty lines crackle on the screen, is the way Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, Rosalind Russell, Paulette Goddard and the others have leaped at the chance to be vixens. ... even Miss Shearer's Mary sharpens her talons finally and joins the birds of prey...(in) one of the best performances she has given. Rosalind Russell, who usually is sympathetic as all-get-out, is flawless...as the archprowler in the Park Avenue jungle. (all the actors are) all so knowing, so keen on their jobs and so successful in bringing them off that we don't know when we've ever seen such a terrible collection of women. They're really appallingly good, and so is their picture."Leonard Maltin gives the film 3 1/2 out of 4 stars: "All-star (and all-female) cast shines in this hilarious adaptation of Clare Boothe play about divorce, cattiness, and