by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I ran Lady
Gangster, a 1942 Warner Bros. “B”
directed by “Florian Roberts” (according to imdb.com, a pseudonym for the
always interesting and sporadically excellent French director Robert Florey,
whose best films were Murders in the Rue Morgue with Bela Lugosi and the underrated Ex-Lady with Bette Davis) from a script by Anthony
Coldewey (sometimes his last name is spelled “Coldeway”) based on a play called
Gangstress: Or, Women in Prison by Dorothy Mackaye and Carlton Miles. Even before the plot started to
seem familiar I could tell this was a remake of a more prestigious production
rather than a story that had started out as a “B,” and I was right: the
original film was called Ladies They Talk About (which sounds more like a soap opera about bored
suburban housewives tempted to adultery than a movie about women prisoners),
was made by Warner Bros. in 1932 and starred the amazing Barbara Stanwyck in
the leading role — which Mackaye, an actress as well as a writer, had originally
written for herself to play on stage. More than anything else it was the moral
ambiguity of the lead character — Mrs. Dorothy Burton, t/n Dorothy Drew (Faye
Emerson) — that marked this as a story originally aimed at a higher-than-“B”
level of production.
When the film begins she’s in a car with a trio of bank
robbers — Carey Wells (Roland Drew from Beasts of Berlin), John (an almost unrecognizable William Hopper,
best known as Paul Drake on the 1950’s Perry Mason TV series) and their getaway driver, Wilson (an
even bigger TV “name” from the 1950’s, Jackie Gleason — still billed here with
a middle initial, Jackie C. Gleason — ironically Gleason’s star-making show, The Honeymooners, would also cast him as a driver, though of a bus
rather than a getaway car!). Her job is to get the security guard at the bank
to open it a half-hour early — at 9:30 instead of 10 a.m. — claiming she needs
to make a deposit to cover the check she’s written for her train ticket out of
town (let’s see how many elements of that plot date this movie — a bank that
doesn’t open until 10 a.m. and a form of long-distance public transportation where you can actually
write a check for your fare!) — though
her real purpose is to get the guard to leave the bank door unlocked so the
robbers can do their thing without a lot of customers (and potential witnesses)
in the way. The males in the gang get away with $40,000 but Dorothy is popped,
and district attorney Lewis Sinton (Herbert Rawlinson) and his investigators
blow her story when it turns out the dog the gang obtained for her to
strengthen her pose of innocence doesn’t answer to the name by which she called
it, “Tiny,” and a tell-tale tag from the pound where they got it states its
name is “Boots.” Kenneth Phillips (Frank Wilcox) sees the photo of Dorothy in
the newspaper story announcing her arrest and recognizes her as Dorothy Drew, a
girl he grew up with in the small town they both came from. Now he’s the head
of the Commodore Broadcasting Company (I joked that their broadcasts really lived
up to Walter Winchell’s promise of reaching “all the ships at sea”) and he
promises to use the resources of his radio network to free Dorothy and show up
Sinton as a corrupt D.A. who makes a big to-do of busting and prosecuting
small-time crooks while the big-fish gangsters and racketeers get away. Alas,
when Dorothy tearfully confesses she was part of the gang, Phillips changes his mind and packs her off to jail,
where (as with Ladies They Talk About) the film’s most interesting scenes take place.
Though Lady Gangster doesn’t go as far as its predecessor in giving us
the backstories of the other women prisoners, there’s intrigue a-plenty as
matron Mrs. Stoner (Virginia Brissac) lays down the law to the women cons: “The
quicker you realize that this is neither a country club nor a concentration
camp, the better. It’s up to the women themselves how they’re treated. If you
behave yourself, we’ll meet you more than halfway, but if you want to be tough,
we can be tough with you.” Dorothy meets up with Myrtle Reed (Julie Bishop),
who’s sympathetic to her, but also runs afoul of prison stool pigeon Lucy
Fenton (Ruth Ford) and “Deaf Annie” (a nicely chilling performance by Dorothy
Adams), who passes information to Lucy that she’s gleaned by reading the other
prisoners’ lips. Midway through the movie Dorothy is dumbfounded when she’s
told that she’s getting a prison visit from her sister — she’s dumbfounded
because she doesn’t have a sister
— and the “sister” turns out to be Carey Wells in (bad) drag. He’s visiting her
there because just before she was arrested she stole the briefcase containing
the $40,000 — she’d overheard the three guys in the gang planning to make off
with the money and leave her not only to face the rap alone but to do so
without the money — and moved it from one hiding place in the boarding house
run by Ma Silsby (Vera Lewis) to another, instructing Ma not to give the
briefcase to anybody unless they present the matching half of a dollar bill she
tears and gives half of to Ma. Dorothy behaves herself in prison and works
herself to be in position for parole, but at the last minute Lucy leaks to Mrs.
Stoner that Dorothy hid the stolen loot before she went to prison and is the
only person who knows where it is, and as a result Mrs. Stoner abruptly
withdraws Dorothy’s name from the parole list. Dorothy is originally convinced
Kenneth Phillips engineered her incarceration and therefore hates him, but
eventually she turns around and decides he loves her (and vice versa), so he
agrees to give him the half of the dollar
bill that will entitle him to retrieve the loot — only she realizes that the
three gangsters who were in on the initial robbery with her are using Phillips
to trace the loot and will kill him as soon as he recovers it, so she escapes
to warn him that he’s being lured into a trap. The movie ends in a shoot-out
with Phillips wounded in the arm, John dead, Carey and Wilson arrested and
Phillips and Dorothy in a clinch.
Lady Gangster is surprisingly well made: vividly directed
(Robert Florey throws in some of the oddball camera angles for which he was
famous), photographed (by Arthur Todd, whose most famous credits these days are
probably the Marx Brothers’ Monkey Business and W. C. Fields’ Million Dollar Legs) and acted. Faye Emerson may not have the
authority or pathos of Barbara Stanwyck — but then, who did? — but she plays
the part excellently, making the most of a script that gives her the chance to
play a morally ambiguous character, a basically decent person who threw herself
into a life of crime and is having a great deal of difficulty getting back out
again. Julie Bishop is also quite good as her confidante (under her real name,
Jacqueline Wells, she’d been the ingénue in the 1934 Karloff-Lugosi The
Black Cat, directed by Edgar G.
Ulmer; this was only her fifth film under the “Julie Bishop” identity and she
would go on to a TV show, but a short-lived one called My Hero that lasted only one season, 1952-53, rather than
a blockbuster hit like The Honeymooners or Perry Mason), and
Frank Wilcox actually brings more authority and emotion to his role than
Preston Foster did in the analogous character in Ladies They Talk About — but then there are rocks with more authority and emotion than Preston
Foster! It’s certainly a much better movie than the similarly titled Lady
Scarface, made the same year at a
different studio (RKO) and with a more prestigious actress (Judith Anderson) in
the lead, but a considerably more clichéd and less well constructed plot line
and more slovenly direction (by Frank Woodruff). Though it’s no great shakes,
especially by comparison with the original version, Lady Gangster is a quite exciting, entertaining thriller,
genuinely moving from the power of Emerson’s performance and Florey’s direction
as well as a characterization and story conception whose relative
sophistication moves it miles ahead of the standard major-studio “B”-unit
production.
