Parole Girl

Parole Girl (Edward S. Cline, 1932) Sylvia Day (Mae Clarke of Frankenstein and The Public Enemy) is a rookie grifter working scams on department stores—when her partner accuses her of being a pick-pocket in public, she threatens the store with legal action, which the managers are  only too willing to avoid by writing a compensatory check ("We don't hold people up! We got a racket!" says her partner, Tony, played by Hale Hamilton)—when she is caught and thrown in prison for a year, after the store's manager won't let her go on directions from the store's insurance agency. As she's carted off she vows vengeance on the man, Joe Smith (Ralph Bellamy), saying she's going to ruin his life the way that he's ruining hers.

In the slammer she meets Jeanie (Marie Prevost), who's in for being an accomplice ("Can you beat a hold-up? Me? I wouldn't do anything as crooked as that! There's too many honest ways for a girl to make a livin': blackmail, forgery and just plain framing a guy in a hotel room...").

With dialog like that, you know it's a Pre-Code film, that era in movies when gangster and socially-minded films told stories of the wages of sin and the value of redemption by openly exploiting the very licentiousness they were warning against in order to attract audiences. They "got away" with a lot in that time before the Hays Code was established. The exploitative aspects of the film were ballyhooed to attract the rubes who were expecting flashes of the seamier side of life, only to be served conventional outcomes and moralistic preaching to keep the Protectors of Society at bay. It's a bit of a shell-game, hearkening back to the roots of hucksters trying to attract a crowd.

Sylvia devises a way to get out. Her old crony on the outside smuggles matches to her, and when assigned to the soft-works factory manages to stage a fire (one should note that this is only 22 years after the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911) and while the other women panic, trying to get out of the locked door, Sylvia grabs the nearest extinguisher she spies and puts out the worst of the fire, then passes out (or pretends to) to get sent to the prison hospital. A grateful warden awards her clemency and she's sprung to seek her revenge on the store executive who had her sent away.

Fortunately, for her, he's all too susceptible: he's just received a promotion, and while he's out celebrating, she finds him and encourages his binge. Fade to black-out.

Smith wakes up with a massive hang-over and a woman's pump in his bed. Sylvia's in the bathroom, ready to give him a chaser—she announces that the two of them are now married, for better and probably worse. No matter that her partner posed as the judge—Smith doesn't know that—and she begins to spend Smith's money like it's going out of style. Plus, there may be an issue of bigamy—Joe might be married, and therefore in trouble with the law. It's a nice little honey-trap and Smith has no idea whether it's true or he's being bamboozled, all he can do is protest that Fate is against him and she must be a woman.

Parole Girl is rather crudely directed with smart, sassy performances and an eye towards moving the show as quickly as possible to keep people from poking holes in the plot. It would inspire a whole sub-genre of noir where the female component has the upper hands over the males and we'll be looking at a few of them—some, the originals and their more recent remakes—in this month of Valentine's.