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.

Up the River (1930)

Up the River (John Ford, 1930) Here's something you don't see every day—a prison comedy. There are very few movies in that sub-genre, but this one's directed by John Ford during the "pre-Code" days at Fox Studios, with the first credited feature film appearances of both Spencer Tracy and Humphrey Bogart—the only time they appeared in a film together.*

Now, of all that information the most important element here is "pre-Code," those lascivious days in old Hollywood, where you could get away with just about anything except murder, and "community standards" were flouted right and left (if anybody could agree on what a community's "standards" were while keeping a straight face and holding firmly to their hypocrisies).

"Man, I hate country prisons!" Two con-artists, "Saint" Louis (Tracy) and Dannemora Dan (Warren Hymer), escape from a "Prison in the South" and make their ways separately to Kansas City. Their fates diverge: Dan goes straight and joins the Salvation Army, and just as he's testifying that "crime doesn't pay," up drives Louis in a fancy rig putting a lie to his argument. An altercation between the two lands them both in Bensonatta prison, where they share a cell—"not too high up with southern exposure" Louis asks the warden and is promptly turned down—with Steve Jordan (Bogart), just a kid who got into a fight that didn't end well for one of his friends going to China. 

Steve's working in the prison now as a clerk, and he's sweet on one of the inmates of the next-door women's prison, Judy Fields (Claire Luce), who's in for fraud (telling fortunes mixed with oil-well tips). Trouble is, Steve is up for parole soon and Judy's still in for another five months. It's eating Steve up, but as the rest of the prisoners know the score, they conspire to get messages between the two of them.

But, there's another party that isn't so interested in them getting together. Judy's old partner, who ran the fortune-telling scam, finds out about their plans and has a mind to profit from it. He worms his way into the Jordan family and decides to blackmail Steve by threatening to tell his mother he hasn't been in China the whole time, but in prison. To add injury to insult, he's also trying to get her and her neighbors to invest in his oil-well scheme. Steve has no idea how he can get his family out of this mess...at least not without going back to prison.

But, help comes in the form of Saint Louis and Dannemora Dan who get wind of the swindle and break out of prison...again...this time during a "follies" show for the inmates. They have a good home cooked meal at the Jordans and get the lowdown. "Don't be a sap" Louis says. "He'll be taken care of...well taken care of." The only thing Louis wants to know is...is Steve "on the level" with Judy (he's already asked her...) and his "Yes" is all he needs to take care of business...and then break back into prison just in time to play in the cooler's baseball game.

It's very much a comedy; there are stakes involved but not of much import, but the movie ends on an interesting note. While the game goes on, the prison choir director starts to lead the inmates in a song about friendship while the camera pans along the inmates—all of them, not missing one. And the song goes on, until every inmate is seen. Dramatically, the sequence has no purpose...except for the prisoners...and their families back home who might be watching just to catch a glimpse of someone they know or love. Family is paramount to John Ford (hence, Steve's predicament in the film's storyline). But, the last touch—sending a present back to the families is Ford at his sentimental best and most charitable.

* That may seem strange if you know both men's backgrounds—they were best friends and drinking buddies. Acting jobs were assigned when the studios ruled Hollywood and the two were contracted for different studios: Tracy for M-G-M and Bogart for the Warner brothers. But, in the 1950's, when stars gained power by forming production companies, they were briefly attached to the same picture—1955's The Desperate Hours—but because their representatives couldn't decide who would get top billing, Tracy stepped aside (Frederic March took the role). Tracy would work again with Ford in The Last Hurrah. Bogart never did.