She may have ended her life as one of the screen's beloved characters, a second-tier, more rough-and-tumble Jessica Tandy, but in her youth Sylvia Sidney was something of a fast baggage and, as we see here, not without her charms. These she did not hesitate to use, parlaying a romance with Paramount chief B.P. Schulberg into the more or less de facto dethronement of the hapless Clara Bow.Even so, she ended up, in the decades before her beldam phase, mostly playing sisters, molls, and jilted girlfriends. I wonder if she ever wondered if it had all been worth it...
