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Broadway playwright/director Edwin H. Burke (also known as Edwin J. Burke) began his movie career at the dawn of the talkie era, when his theatrical piece Brothers was adapted for the screen as Woman Trap (1929). Another of Burke's plays, the frothy "companionate marriage" concoction This Thing Called Love, served as the basis for two films, the first a 1929 vehicle for Edmund Lowe and Constance Bennett, the second a 1940 Rosalind Russell starrer. From 1929 through 1935, Burke was employed as a screenwriter at Fox. During this period, his script for Bad Girl (1931) won an Academy Award; he also served as director for the Fox feature Now I'll Tell. Overall, Edwin Burke's screen work was distinguished by strong, defiantly independent female characters, be they played by Clara Bow (Call Her Savage) or Shirley Temple (The Littlest Rebel).