Blonde Venus (1932) on Netflix

A cabaret singer takes up with a millionaire to pay for her gravely ill husband's operation.

American chemist Ned Faraday marries a German entertainer and starts a family. However, he becomes poisoned with Radium and needs an expensive treatment in Germany to have any chance at being cured. Wife Helen returns to night club work to attempt to raise the money and becomes popular as the Blonde Venus. In an effort to get enough money sooner, she prostitutes herself to millionaire Nick Townsend. While Ned is away in Europe, she continues with Nick but when Ned returns cured, he discovers her infidelity. Now Ned despises Helen but she grabs son Johnny and lives on the run, just one step ahead of the Missing Persons Bureau. When they do finally catch her, she loses her son to Ned. Once again she returns to entertaining, this time in Paris, and her fame once again brings her and Townsend together. Helen and Nick return to America engaged, but she is irresistibly drawn back to her son and Ned. In which life does she truly belong?

—Gary Jackson <garyjack5@cogeco.ca>

While hiking in the Black Forest with a group of students, the American chemist Ned Faraday meets the German artist Helen and sooner they get married. Years later, living in New York and having a boy, Johnny, Ned gets sick, poisoned by twelve years of exposition to radium in his experiments. However, his doctor tells him that In Dresden he would have a chance of healing, but the treatment would cost the fortune of US$ 1,500.00. Helen decides to work in a night-club under the pseudonym of Blonde Venus to raise some money for his travel. When she meets the playboy millionaire Nick Townsend, she decides to ask for money to have an affair with him. Ned goes to Germany and Helen becomes Nick's mistress. When her cured husband returns fifteen days ahead the schedule, he finds that she had been unfaithful to him. Ned decides to take Johnny from Helen, forcing her to runaway with their son with the police in their tail.

—Claudio Carvalho

Helen Faraday is a nightclub singer turned housewife, but when her husband needs money to have a life-saving operation, she decides to resume her career as a singer to raise money, she undergoes a chain of events that separate her from her husband and force her to make a choice between her lucrative singing career, and her role as a wife and mother.

—Andrew Hyatt <dres@uiuc.edu>