The Lady affords another opportunity for Talmadge to demonstrate her range, not by playing two contrasting characters as in Yes or No, but by following one character through many years and many vicissitudes. The character relates her story in flashback to a patron of the bar she runs, telling him how she, Polly Pearl, once a London music-hall singer, married an aristocrat, was deserted by him when pregnant, had to abandon her child to a friendly minister and his wife when her husband’s father tried to take the child from her, and spent the rest of her life searching for her son.
The film is an adaptation of a play by Martin Brown that was moderately successful on Broadway, (85 performances, December 1923 – February 1924). The play was generally well received, the dominant tone being a slightly condescending nostalgia for a bygone theatrical era. There were a very few dissenting voices to this verdict, both approving and disapproving. Brown himself argued that the play was not a melodrama, but a realist drama. Robert Benchley noted with approval that it broke a theatrical taboo by allowing its heroine to say out loud that she was pregnant. The Wall Street Journal denounced it as an example of the deplorable modern insistence on putting the seamy side of life on the stage. These dissents perhaps suggest some of the difficulties faced by the film.
Reviews of the film in both the big-city trade and regular press, by contrast, lack the somewhat condescending tone of those of the play. Instead, with one significant exception, the praise is almost hyperbolic, especially where Talmadge’s acting is concerned. Witness Variety’s Sisk, not usually an over-generous critic: “a fine story, fine cast, with work by the star and director that is both intelligent and straightforward, combine to make The Lady take equal rank with the greatest Talmadge efforts.” Mordaunt Hall in the New York Times enthused: “The film version of The Lady is really well done, and Miss Talmadge gives one of the finest performances of her screen career.” The exception is Wid’s Daily: “This is sadly lacking in commercial value. […] I fear this is due for a definite flop at the box offices. It is not entertaining. It lacks romance and dramatic conflict. I cannot feel that the public are particularly crazy about seeing Norma do old woman characterizations.” This is so out of line that one might suspect Wid Gunning just had a bad day, were it not that it is echoed by a large majority of the reports from theatre managers, mostly from small towns, in Exhibitors Herald. As A. Mitchell, of the Dixie Theatre in Russellville, Kentucky, put it: “No doubt you know that Norma Talmadge in The Lady is rotten.” The problem does not seem to have been with the star (Mitchell is complaining that in order to get Graustark, he had to book The Lady), but rather with this particular film, or type of film. The general view is well represented in the comment of M.J. Aley of Eureka, Kansas: “A mighty good picture if your patrons like foreign atmosphere and costumes. Ours don’t. Goodbye, Norma, until you make some modern pictures with American locale.” “Foreign atmosphere” seems to be a code word for “sex.” Of course, there is no sex in the foreground of the movie, but prostitution hovers in the background, literally so, since the “cabaret” in which Polly gives birth is clearly a brothel. Even in the big cities, the film failed to live up to the expectations aroused by the reviews. It does not seem to have been held over anywhere, and venues that had a two-week booking generally had a bad falling-off at the box office in the second week. We do not suppose the film lost money – with block booking that is quite hard to do – but it was nowhere near a success on the order of most of the other Talmadge films in our Giornate series.
Norma herself was well aware of this reaction. When an interviewer enthused about The Lady, she responded: “Oh, yes. But I am not going to do any more like it for a time, anyway. Not that I don’t like to do characterizations – I love it. For myself, if I had to choose, it would be characterizations and costume pictures, always. But what can we do? We must play to the box office. […] So for a while I am going to do modern things. I think they want to see me in gowns, in style.”

Ben Brewster, Lea Jacobs