Matinee Musings: The Devil's Holiday

Note: A good date movie if your sweetie has a demonstrated liking for Depression‑era morality plays.* It’s short, talky, and sincere. Nancy Carroll’s charm sparks conversation, and debating mercy and forgiveness afterward beats potentially explosive topics like who gets the dog if you break up.  “Do you think redemption should come from love, honesty … or just admitting everything before Act Three?”

The Devil's Holiday
1930 / 1:18
Tagline: “A fast and furious modern merry-go-round of falsehood and frame-ups romance and realism”
[youtube]

Directed by Edmund Goulding, this Pre-Code curio begins like yet another cynical take on The Way We Live Now circa the slough of the Depression. Nancy Carroll’s Hallie Hobart is a professional “nice girl,” a city-wise operator who parades as a respectable manicurist while at night sweet-talking prospects into the arms of salesmen hawking high-priced goods and services. She takes her tidy three percent, thank you, for social engineering with a smile. Under the gimlet eye of Ned Sparks’ middle-man Charlie - every line a staccato calculation - Hallie meets Phillips Holmes’ David Stone, a hayseed innocent with a backbone stiffened by a sanctimonious papa (Hobart Bosworth, who outdoes Raymond Massey in East of Eden for granite-faced and unyielding, yet vulnerable).

Carroll is the picture - full stop. There’s wit in her eyes and fatigue behind it, a practiced brightness giving way to something close to conscience. It’s that flicker - call it soul, call it wise mind - that keeps Hallie from becoming just another fast-talking moll in a coarse-talking picture. Holmes is earnest and serviceable, with Carroll in the first of three pairings (Stolen Heaven, Broken Lullaby). Bosworth brings the heavy furniture of morality - the kind that includes being tolerant but not too. And terrific Sparks, of course, clicks and clacks with stone-hearted efficiency, a business shark whose pulse can be read on the Dow.

What Goulding serves up, beneath the fancy duds and eternal hustling, is a moral melodrama that refuses to be priggish even as it inches toward repentance. Sin here isn’t a single slip; corner cutting becomes a habit. Hallie’s mistake isn’t merely the masquerade of manicurist for escort - it’s the gradual giving up of her own Iowa standards and how imperceptibly she’s learned to keep feeling and thinking severely apart. The film’s shrewder than its plot suggests. The movie understands that normalization of deviance - a.k.a. losing your ethical way - rarely arrives all at once; it creeps in through small compromises, each one nudging the next, until a single, grotesque transgression begins to look reasonable. Like love, self-deception and destructive habits have a way of stealing up on you.

Redemption, when it arrives, is coaxed out - painfully - through recognition of guilt. Hallie, ashamed, realizes she can’t leave David. But Goulding doesn’t kid us movie-goers. Reconciliation is messy, shame is paralyzing. The film gets across that atonement isn’t a solo act, it happens in a web of human connections - someone else has to listen, with an open heart, and forgive. 

So, it is worth seeing even though the wonderful ZaSu Pitts is only in the opening scene, playing her usual switchboard operator. Black actor Oscar Smith plays a bellhop in a brief scene but he is given no lines so his dysfluency isn’t used for outdated comic relief. The movie is worth seeing for Nancy Carrol’s Oscar-nominated performance, a quiet triumph. She lost the Best Actress award to Norma Shearer, who was phenomenal in The Divorcee.

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* What do you mean this population numbers about a dozen movie-goers? Picture me looking as dumb-founded as Philip Seymour Hoffman in Twister when hysterical Jamie Gertz was castigating the storm chasers, “You people are all crazy!”

Perry Mason 154: Happy Birthday Erle Stanley Gardner

Erle Stanley Gardner, July 17, 1889 – March 11, 1970

Let’s not pretend Erle Stanley Gardner was a stylist. He wasn’t, and - God bless him - he knew it. Gardner said the trick was to keep writing and learn from the lumps you take from the critics. That’s not artful, but it’s honest, and honesty is a fair beginning for a man who made his living by putting fictional clients in dutch with the law and getting them off.

Gardner is kin to the popular mystery writers who sell by the carload. He shares their thrift with words. His vocabulary sometimes looks like a pantry half-stocked: two trusty adverbs - “abruptly” and “evidently” - like salt and pepper, forever at hand. Faces turn into “masks,” eyes “twinkle” on cue, and the prose keeps time about as well as a drummer with mittens. If you’re waiting for rhythm or atmosphere, you’ll miss your train. Gardner isn’t painting Hawaiian moonlight like Biggers; he’s pouring clues and stuff like “law of agency,” one after another, and trusting hardcore readers will keep up.

Characterization? He pares it to the rind. Folks in these books are not so much people as types with mannerisms. Perry Mason, thinking hard, jams his thumbs into the armholes of his vest and paces. Paul Drake, taking ease, slings both legs over the chair arm like a man born in a furniture warehouse. And Los Angeles - though it’s nearly always the scene - is more Zoom background than character. It doesn’t sweat, menace, or sing the way Simenon’s Paris does, or push the plot like Ross Macdonald’s Southern California. It’s a set with a fine supply of doors for suspects to enter and exit.

The books have grown quaint, which is a polite way to say they creak. A modern reader bumps into the museum pieces: cuspidors, carbon paper, hat boxes, gladstone bags, and a hunt for telephones that would make a millennial wonder. The idioms (as right as a rivet) smell of attic trunks; the jobs and fashions arrive with a grin and a question mark. You can laugh; Gardner will not be offended. He didn’t come to win the Pulitzer. He came to keep the plot moving.

Even the names have dust on them. In The Case of the Daring Decoy the roll call sounds like a high-toned tea: Gifford, Rosalind, Mildred, Evangeline, Norton, Ruth. Call me a lumbering oaf of the old school, but I find it easier to make a Phyllis an aunt than a siren.

Why read Gardner, then? Because the man built something solid where it matters. Perry Mason is a lunch‑pail champion in a sharp suit. He is the lawyer as fighter, not functionary. He doesn’t let the chips fall; he kicks them back onto the table and argues the dealer into a new shuffle. Judges, district attorneys, cops - good, bad, and indifferent - stand between the client and daylight, and Mason shouldered through on behalf of folks without friends in high places. He’s a private man pitched against public machinery, and he keeps his elbows out.

There’s a nostalgia in it, and not only for hat closets. When I was little kid in the Sixties, Americans had a talent for Hell, No. They argued, they balked, they took a dim view of orders barked by any overbearing blowhard in a uniform. The fashion now is for agreeable virtues - tolerant, sensitive, flexible, mindful - which often read, in office life, as polite ways to be steamrolled by The Combine. Mason is tonic against that. He reminds you that somebody can still put up a fight without being all resilient about it.

Make no mistake: Gardner’s world is not polite society with the silver laid. But while the blackmail and murder are grimy and the motives are sharp - greed, jealousy, desire - the tone generally refuses the abyss. There’s less sadism than sweat. If the rooms reek with cigarette smoke, the moral air is still breathable. Gardner worked a long time in the real world - law offices, boxing gyms, vacationed in auto camps to keep in touch with the folks - and he knew how mines and banks operate. That knowledge gives the stories their ballast. The world is tough as taxes and, in some corners, gone to seed.

Where Gardner shines is the old practical magic: plotting. He hustles. He stacks incidents like plates in a diner rush, and somehow gets them all to the right table in time for the courtroom fireworks. If you’re after escape, he’s company to keep. Say what you will about Kipling, Maugham, Simenon, Ian Fleming - these are the writers you blushingly confess to enjoying, writing what Orwell called “good bad books.”

As to the grand judgment, Raymond Chandler, in his letters, tipped his hat to Gardner’s knack for building a case you had to turn the pages to resolve.

That intensity may be a matter of style, situation, character, emotional tone, or idea. ... It may also be a perfection of control over the movement of a story similar to the control a great pitcher has over the ball. That is to me what you have more than anything else and more than anyone else. ... Every page throws the hook for the next. I call this a kind of genius.

 

The Ides of Robert Florey: Meet Boston Blackie

Note: Chester Morris said the character Boston Blackie wrecked his career but it was also a comeback vehicle for him. Possessing an effortless urbanity, a sly wit, and the sort of raffish charm that no studio publicity department could manufacture, Morris transformed a dependable series of B-picture programmers into something far more enduring. His Blackie moved through the criminal underworld with the confidence of a man who knew all its angles, yet retained the likability that kept audiences firmly in his corner. 

Meet Boston Blackie
1941 / 1:00
Tagline: “SPIES STALK CONEY ISLAND!”
[internet archive]

Boston Blackie is one of those distinctly American creations who could only flourish in the movies: a gentleman crook who violates the law with enthusiasm while remaining, somehow, more trustworthy than many of the men charged with enforcing it. Safecracker, magician, improvisational escape artist, and amateur criminologist, Blackie occupies that narrow strip of moral real estate between outlaw and civic benefactor. He steals when necessary, lies when convenient, and yet remains possessed of a code that makes him more honorable than the respectable citizens forever trying to pin something on him.

Like all great pulp heroes, he survives less by brute force than by velocity of thought. Problems arise, policemen bluster, villains scheme, and Blackie simply moves faster than everyone else. He treats danger as an irritating interruption and authority as a puzzle to be solved. One gets the sense that if locked in a bank vault, handcuffed to a radiator, and guarded by a platoon of armed men, he would emerge ten minutes later carrying the guard captain's wallet and offering instructions on improving workplace efficiency.

Director Robert Florey, that French stylist who brought visual sophistication to even the most modest productions, attacks the material with energy bordering on mischief. The camera rarely sits still when it can climb, lean, peek, or swoop instead. It observes the action from improbable angles, transforming ordinary fairground attractions into looming structures of menace. The midway becomes a maze. The carnival rides become mechanical monsters. Even a simple walkway seems laden with threat when filtered through Florey's restless imagination.

The amusement park itself emerges as the film's true star. By daylight these places promise cotton candy, first romances, and indigestion from regrettable food choices. By night they become dreamscapes of blinking lights and distorted shadows. The Tunnel of Love, ordinarily the setting for awkward courtship, is repurposed into a stage for pursuit and violence. Murder lurks behind painted scenery. Romance and danger occupy neighboring compartments in the same little boat.

Naturally there are chases, because a crime picture without a chase is rather like a circus without elephants. Massive automobiles thunder across the screen with the invulnerability enjoyed only by vehicles in 1940s motion pictures. Fire hydrants explode into geysers. Tires squeal. Nobody ever seems concerned about insurance claims. The laws of physics are suspended in favor of spectacle, and the audience is all the happier for it.

The police fare less well. They are not corrupt so much as chronically exasperated. Their threats are colorful, their patience limited, and their investigative methods frequently eclipsed by Blackie's intuition. Once again the hero finds himself trapped in that familiar predicament of knowing more than the authorities while simultaneously being suspected by them. It is a formula as old as the series itself, but like a favorite tune, its familiarity is part of the pleasure.

Comic relief arrives in the form of The Runt, who functions somewhere between valet, sidekick, accomplice, and mobile source of confusion. Mercifully, the humor supports rather than derails the narrative. No one behaves like a refugee from a different movie. The jokes emerge naturally from character and situation, allowing the suspense to remain intact.

What ultimately makes the picture work is its breezy faith in intelligence, adaptability, and personal freedom. Blackie wins not because he possesses official authority but because he possesses ingenuity. In a world crowded with crooks, bureaucrats, and blunderers, he survives through wit, nerve, and optimism. The result is an entertaining little thriller that moves briskly, looks splendid, and offers a reminder that sometimes the fox is more admirable than either the hounds pursuing him or the wolves he is hunting.

Perry Mason 153: Trust the Process?

Note: People often want others to like what they like because it validates their own choices, fosters a sense of belonging, and allows them to share the enjoyment of experiences. While these impulses are deeply rooted in human nature, the motivations behind them vary from person to person. For my part, I would hate to see Erle Stanley Gardner's work fade into obscurity the way Mignon Eberhart's novels largely have. At the same time, I recognize that this is a natural process: yesterday's popular authors are often forgotten as tastes change and new generations of readers find different stories that speak to them. That said, my sense of identity is not tied to my reading preferences. If someone mocks or dismisses the books I enjoy, I do not take it as a personal affront. Readers are free to like what they like, and just as importantly, they are under no obligation to defend their tastes to anyone else.

Trust the Process? Tell That to TikTok: Perry Mason Meets Today’s Inveterate Institutional Skepticism

A modern reader can walk into a Perry Mason novel carrying a certain amount of suspicion. The police may be mistaken. The prosecutor may be overconfident. The legal system may be tilted in ways that produce bad outcomes. In many contemporary stories, that's the starting point.

Then along comes Perry Mason.

Mason lives in a world where the problem is not that objective reality is unknowable, but that those in authority repeatedly fail to recognize the truth. Witnesses lie or are just mistaken and think they are telling truth. Police jump to conclusions. Circumstantial evidence points in the wrong direction. The authorities become convinced of a theory and stop looking. Mason's job is to keep looking.

That distinction matters. Gardner's novels run on faith in process. Not blind faith, and certainly not faith in authority, but faith that careful investigation, logical reasoning, and relentless questioning can eventually force reality to reveal itself. Mason will occasionally bend a rule, but usually in the spirit of a mechanic tweaking an engine. He isn't trying to blow up the machine. He wants to make it work properly.

This helps explain why Mason remains such an appealing character. He's a virtuoso. He notices what everyone else misses. He asks the question nobody thought to ask. He walks into situations that appear hopelessly tangled and patiently begins pulling on the right threads. A large part of the pleasure of reading Gardner comes from watching smarts and expertise in action.

What Gardner is selling, however, is not cynicism. Mason spends an extraordinary amount of time exposing police mistakes, prosecutorial overreach, and official complacency. Yet the novels never suggest that justice is impossible or that the system is irredeemably corrupt. Their criticism is corrective rather than destructive.

The structure of the stories makes this clear. A case begins with appearances pointing firmly in one direction. The wrong suspect is arrested. The evidence seems overwhelming. The authorities congratulate themselves on a quick solution. Then Mason starts asking questions. More facts emerge. Assumptions fall apart. The picture changes.

The remedy is almost always the same: more investigation, more scrutiny, and better reasoning.

That is why the courtroom in a Gardner novel is not a sham or a theatrical backdrop. It is the place where error is tested. The drama comes from watching a flawed process gradually become a more accurate one.

A skeptical reader might reasonably object that Mason's victories are individual rather than systemic. He clears one innocent client at a time; he does not reform society. Fair enough. But that limitation is precisely what keeps the books from becoming cynical. They do not argue that the law is a fraud. They argue that the law is a human tool - imperfect, sometimes misused, but still capable of producing justice when placed in competent hands.

Gardner's underlying optimism can feel almost old-fashioned today. The enduring appeal of Perry Mason lies in that optimism. Gardner's novels insist that mistakes, biases, and institutional failures are real, but they also insist that truth remains discoverable and that determined individuals can compel authorities to recognize it. The books are not warnings about collapse; they are arguments for the power of reason, preparation, and persistence to make imperfect institutions work better.

Perry Mason 152: TCOT Vagabond Virgin

Note: How could anyone not finish a novel whose first chapter poses this immortal question: “Can you put a virgin in jail as a vagrant?” That’s not just a hook - it’s a literary speed bump that makes you slam the brakes and say, “Wait…what?” You know you’re in for a ride when Chapter One sounds like a cross between a law textbook and a bad pickup line.

The Case of the Vagabond Virgin - Erle Stanley Gardner

John Racer Addison had everything: wealth, power, and a name that blew open doors in the world of big retail. But success breeds enemies, and Addison was about to learn that the price of privilege could be murder.

It began innocently enough. Returning from a business trip, Addison gave a ride to Veronica Dale - a girl with platinum hair, wide blue eyes, and a story that tugged at his conscience. She had traveled far, had no money, and looked heartbreakingly vulnerable. Addison arranged a hotel room for her, alone, and slipped her some cash. It was an act of kindness. Or so he thought.

Hours later, Veronica was arrested for vagrancy - the arresting officer figured she would be safer in jail than the mean streets of L.A. Addison panicked. A scandal could destroy him. He called Perry Mason - the man who could turn disaster into triumph. Mason sprung the girl, and soon Veronica was working in Addison’s department store (remember those?), selling hosiery and flashing that innocent smile. 

Then came Eric Hansell. Red-haired, smooth-talking, and rotten to the core. He threatened Addison with a headline that could ruin him: “Department Store Tycoon Sets Up Blonde in Love Nest.” Addison saw his empire crumbling. He turned to Mason, and together they plotted to outwit the blackmailer.

But before the plan could unfold, Addison’s partner - Edgar Z. Ferrell - was found dead. Murdered. And Addison was the prime suspect.

The courtroom became a battlefield. Hamilton Burger, pompous and preening, thought he had Mason cornered. He didn’t. Mason played his cards with icy precision, dismantling the prosecution piece by piece. The climax was pure Gardner - a twist so audacious it left the jury gasping and Burger fuming.

This 1948 novel isn’t just a whodunit. It’s a study in greed, lust, and the fragile veneer of respectability. Addison, impulsive and irritable, is vivid in his desperation. Veronica, the girl who could topple empires with a smile, is a reminder that beauty has unintended consequences in this wacky world. Even Sergeant Holcomb, arrogant and ominous, adds a note of menace to the mix.

Gardner doesn’t waste time on psychology - his characters live in the moment, driven by fear, anger and desire. But in this story, they leap off the page - unusual for Gardner characters to be so life-like. Yes, the ending may feel rushed, but the journey is pure thrill - a glittering cocktail of sex, money, and murder.

Matinee Musings: Among the Missing

Note: In City Limits (1934) two homeless guys teach a tycoon to enjoy life. In Hitchhike Lady (1935) two women meet on the road and form a heart-warming bond. Midnight Mary (1933) is a fast, economical crime melodrama with a tough shell but a tender center – the heroine’s longing for a better life and real connection gives the film its emotional weight. This is another little movie of the time, forgotten, with a big soul.

Among the Missing
1934 / 1:06
Tagline: “His life was a crooked path until he crossed the path of romance!”
[youtube]

This wonderful little tale is the kind of modest studio picture that slips past you if you’re looking only for Pre-Code naughtiness. But it rewards attention with an intelligence determined not to be limited by technical hassles. At a time when early sound films were still hugging the safety of their padded, echo-proof interiors, Columbia’s programmers were not expected to take risks.

Yet here is a film that ventures out into Los Angeles at night - into its streets, its shadows, its semi-smoggy air - and comes back with something like authenticity. The city is an authentic space. The dim pools of streetlight, the casual movement of passersby, the clutter of exterior life all lend the film a kind of immediacy that studio-bound contemporaries rarely achieve. There is less theatrical posing, more observation; less contrivance, more texture. The result is a tone that feels unexpectedly modern - grittier, yes, but also more genuine.

But also humane. That humanity is most striking in the film’s curious marriage of hardboiled criminality and domestic melodrama. Jewel thieves, in the 1930s imagination, belong to a Raffles world of speed, elan, and hard edges. Yet Among the Missing deposits them in a space that insists on pots on the stove, on swept floors, on bowls of home-made doughnuts. The antique store is not merely a front for fencing stolen jewelry; it becomes, under the influence of an old lady on the run from exploitation, a home. The transformation is effected by Aunt Martha (Henrietta Crosman), and here the film’s real originality asserts itself. Not a victim, she is, rather, a moral force - quiet, observant, busy and full of practical wisdom.

Driven from her nephew’s household by petty ingratitude, Martha wanders around Los Angeles and, by narrative coincidence that doesn’t feel forced, into the orbit of two thieves running an antique shop as a front. If the setup sounds like boilerplate, the execution is anything but. The crooks – Tommy (Richard Cromwell), all callow entitlement and impulsive resentment; the English cutter of jewels (Ivan Simpson), perpetually dissatisfied; and the older Gordon (Arthur Hohl), wily and watchful - are sharply drawn types. They expect to use Martha as camouflage, a harmless old housekeeper to deflect suspicion. Instead, they find themselves subject to her steady gaze.

Martha cooks. She cleans. She makes pancakes. These gestures, simple and unadorned, begin to erode Tommy’s carefully cultivated hardness. She recognizes more than he intends to reveal, and he senses it. Tommy bristles under her scrutiny, interpreting her concern as interference, her double-edged remarks about living in a “big house” as baleful prediction.

Yet it is precisely in these exchanges - half domestic nagging, half moral instruction - that the film finds its tension. Martha does not sermonize; she assumes Tommy has a conscience somewhere and speaks to it. She turns the police away when necessary, protecting Tommy even as she reminds him Judy (Billie Seward) is too nice a girl to be allied with a thief who is prison bound, creating a space in which gratitude, guilt, and the possibility of change can coexist.

The hideout, then, becomes something more than a backdrop for crime. It is a moral arena, like anyplace can be should a movie-goer want to frame it that way.* Martha’s belief in Tommy - her insistence that he can imagine a life beyond grand theft and incarceration - introduces an emotional counterpoint that reminds us everybody counts and everything they do counts too. The film never lets Tommy entirely off the hook; he remains petulant, self-justifying, and only intermittently responsive until he sees the cold hard facts about his partners in crime.

In lesser hands, this blend of grit and gentility might dissolve into syrup. Here, it’s persuasive. The Los Angeles nights give the film its edge; Aunt Martha gives it its conscience. Between them, Among the Missing becomes something unexpectedly resonant: a small film with a big heart, in keeping with Oscar Wilde’s radical notion that “Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.”

* I thus give away my entire philosophy of movie reviewing in a phrase.

The Nones of Robert Florey: Registered Nurse

Note: A moralist like me must object that this movie blurs standards of sexual propriety and professional ethics. Its plot involves prostitution, venereal disease, and undercover deception, portraying a nurse entangled with criminals. Such themes, handled sensationally for melodrama, could be seen as undermining respectability, chastity, and trust in medical professionals generally. But .. Bebe Daniels! She’s so likable she could over-charge me for a second melodrama sandwich and I’d thank her for the privilege. Bebe Daniels! Bebe Daniels!

Registered Nurse
1934 / 1:03
Tagline: “A blazing closeup of nurses in love - and the men who take their kisses!”
[internet archive]

This Pre-Code melodrama is set in a hospital with a focus on the nursing staff. The head nurse and the Mama of a brothel compare notes on recruitment and retention of “good girls” for staff. The Mama complains “Ya know, your best girls are always leaving ya, setting up in business for themselves. Sometimes right across the street.”

“It's one of those businesses that just runs itself,” the Mama says. “You know, it just rolls on and on and on.” Contrast the placid uneventfulness of a sporting house with the hospital’s churning soap opera. In a moment of indiscretion, the Mama lets on that she recognizes an intern as a patron of her “establishment,” to a nurse’s suspicious surprise. 

Not just sex, but death too. A little boy dies before he can bring his dog to visit his favorite nurse. A mother dies, survived by four small children. A young hoodlum shoots dead a policeman who was going to marry one of the nurses as soon as they had enough money.

Using this fatal shooting in support of his argument not to postpone anything in this cycle of suffering and rebirth, Dr. Lyle Talbot seduces Nurse Bebe Daniels with the tried and true line “Life is short and uncertain.” Poor Bebe is in a bad way because New York family law prohibits her from divorcing an incurably insane spouse.

“Whoever figures out these things,” observes the head nurse, “makes a hash of it,” which seems to me to be a swipe at both New York politicians and the author of all things. But cynicism and nihilism, we movie-goers know well, come with the territory in a Pre-Code picture.

The movie does not try to look like a documentary but succeeds in appearing “slice of life,” a look and feel that Warner Brothers went for in the early Thirties. Violent drunks in the emergency room. Gangsters and madams beating each other up. In the cafeteria, doctors make non-medical staff turn green with descriptions of “dirty” operations of infected organs. Nurses constantly smoking in no-smoking areas is a running joke. Nurse Bebe smacks out of control patients to enculturate American values. “Hey! Dames don’t slap me where I come from!” immigrant crook Sidney Toler gripes in an unidentifiable accent. And Bebe answers, “If you don’t behave yourself, I’ll slap you so hard you’ll forget where you came from.”

Granting the picture looks gritty enough, we still have questions about its tenuous relationship with what we laughingly refer to as reality. Did nurses really wear shoes with high heels at work? Why does gangster Sidney Toler stay in the hospital when he has only a broken leg? Was beacon of civilization New York really a state that disallowed mental incompetence or insanity as grounds for divorce?* Given that the first lobotomy in the USA was not performed until 1936, what surgery was going to cure certain psychoses in 1934? Did medical staff really don their formal wear for a party for a couple getting married? Did doctors really talk about “how far” they’ve gotten (“Have you got to first base?” “I’m still on the bench with her.”)? Was there really a cocktail called the bosom caresser “because it warms you all the way down?”

Bebe Daniels of the gorgeous voice has forlorn facial expressions that’re fetching. She has the ability to be still and yet give off energy that grabs the attention – maybe she transferred that knack from dance or the silents. Kind, clever, unstoppable - sigh. 

Sidney Toler is a gangster that the madam (Irene Franklin) calls a “big begonia.” He’s more sinister than flowering and the movie-goer can assume for him violence is the first resort. Directed by a film noir pioneer, Robert Florey, the movie is often visually striking, with odd camera angles, intense close-ups, night scenes and great use of light.

As an example of another Pre-Code element about this movie, a suicide is treated as the ghost in the machine that makes everything turn out hunky-dory. The most Pre-Code thing is that all the characters are OK with suicide tying everything up with a nice little bouquet. So the amoral atmosphere is not exactly for the kiddish at heart.

* In fact, yes, adultery was the only grounds allowed for a very long time in not only the great state of New York.