Outcast Lady on AllMovie

Outcast Lady is a heavily censored version of Michael Arlen's once-notorious novel The Green Hat, previously filmed by Greta Garbo as A Woman of Affairs. Constance Bennett is Iris March, a woman cursed by her beauty, doomed to drive everyone around her -- including herself -- to destruction. When her new husband Boy Fenwick (Ralph Forbes) commits suicide on their wedding night, Iris, who's been unfaithful to him, is held responsible, especially when the reason for Fenwick's demise is kept a secret by his snobbish family (He had contacted syphilis in the Arlen original; in the film, he fears exposure of a previous prison term). Realizing that she has brought nothing but sorrow to the Fenwick family, Iris nobly steps into her fashionable touring car and smashes it into a tree. Oddly enough, Iris' death is amusing in retrospect, inasmuch as Constance Bennett would suffer a similar demise at the beginning of 1937's Topper, thereby allowing her to cavort through the rest of the picture as a ghost.