An absolute dog with one redeeming feature. It’s a Billy Dove vehicle:

Who? Sigh. How soon they forget. And by "they" I mean "we." And by "we" I mean "me."

This isn't her.

That's Kay Francis, playing  Countess Olga Balakireff. We get the idea right away that she's a woman who's not constrained by the roles of the day:

That's . . . something.

Oh sure, our modern era invented gender ambiguity:

Anyway, I wish the movie was more about her. She's a minor story that contrasts with our Decent Heroine. This is Billie.

Bio:

Dove was born Bertha Bohny in 1903 to Charles and Bertha (née Kagl) Bohny, Swiss immigrants. As a teen, she worked as a model to help support her family and was hired as a teenager by Florenz Ziegfeld to appear in his Ziegfeld Follies Revue. She legally changed her name to Lillian Bohny in the early 1920s and moved to Hollywood, where she began appearing in silent films. She soon became one of the most popular actresses of the 1920s, and was dubbed The American Beauty (1927), the title of one of her films.

Dove had a huge legion of male fans, one of her most persistent being Howard Hughes.

Oh that's a recipe for fun.

Well, she goes off to London, and finds herself in . . .

Let's meet Paul:

Basil doesn't look terribly well, but that's because he's An Artist who drives himself too hard for His Art. Of course Billie Dove marries him, and has to renounce her life of ease. Sorry, Dad, I have go to him! I must - say, am I lamping you all with my luminous orbs enough? No? More?

It’s an early Rathbone, and it makes you wonder how the hell he survived this. He’s just awful. Well, his character is awful.

Dude.

Paul leaves Billie the Decent Wife for the Big Eyed Vixen, finds that his new affair is not what he thought. She complains that he practices too much:

Yes, he's doing a Fronsh accent.

I'll give it this: the obligatory "rise of the artist to fame, which includes cigarette endorsements" has some interesting transitions to move the tale along. To modern sensibilities, though, man: this takes forever.