Directed by Lloyd Bacon
Written by Robert Rossen and Abem Finkel
1937/USA
Warner Bros.
First viewing
Mary Dwight Strauber: I’ll get you, even if I have to crawl back from the grave to do it!
Bette Davis is a sometime thing for me. This wasn’t one of those times.
Mary Dwight (Davis) is a “hostess” at a nightclub/clip joint owned by ruthless gangster Johnny Vanning (Eduardo Cianelli). She has been keeping her occupation from her sweet kid sister Betty. One night Mary is entertaining a man who gives Johnny a bad check to cover his gambling losses. The man ends up dead and Mary is a material witness. Mary first agrees to help Assistant DA David Graham (Humphrey Bogart), then succumbs to intimidation and perjures herself to help Johnny. Betty is so upset with Mary’s revelation that she quits school and starts attending Johnny’s “parties”. When things go wrong for Betty, Mary confronts Johnny head on. With Isabel Jewell as one of the good-time girls.
This movie has one of those muckraking, overearnest scripts that don’t do the actors any favors. That said, Humphrey Bogart manages to maintain his dignity while Bette Davis comes off more strident than tough. Davis’s performance took the movie with it as she is on screen virtually the entire time. Cianelli, as always, made a truly scary villain, though.
I love the term “hostess” when they really mean prostitutes. This was not a particularly good film but believe it or not, I have a lobby card from it hanging in my second floor halllway.
The good thing about this movie is that it has Mayo Methot, who was Bogie’s wife at the time and she could always play the bad girl with style.
I kept thinking about what they could have done with the story in the pre-Code days! That is interesting about Bogie’s wife.