A Thrill for Thelma (MGM, 1935)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Following 12 Desperate Hours I tured on Turner Classic Movies for a 1935 MGM “Crime Does Not Pay” short, fourth in the long-running series,called A Thrill for Thelma. The “Crime Does Not Pay” series started out as a series of mock newsreels made by MGM in1934 to stop the campaign of socialist-turned-Democrat Upton Sinclair for governor of California. The intent was to show that if Sinclair won, the state would be flooded with ruffians and bums of all kinds taking advantage of the anti-poverty programs Sinclair proposed, and once the newsreels did their job and Sinclair lost, MGM kept the unit together and shifted focus to anti-crime films. The “Crime Does Not Pay”movies served as a training ground for various actors, writers and directors whom MGM wanted to groom for bigger careers. The first film in the series, Buried Loot, featured an up-and-coming actor named Robert Taylor who soon became a major star.

A Thrill for Thelma opens at a women’s prison where Thelma Black (Irene Hervey) is serving a 20-year sentence for robbery and accessory to murder, and then in lashbacks narrated by both Thelma herself and police captain Richard Kyne (Robert Warwick), who arrested her, we lsee Thelma at her high-school graduation two years ago. She tells her classmate that she wants “thrills” and an exciting, lavish lifestyle. Thelma gets a job at a beauty salon in a hotel – there’s a scene in which she enviously fingers a fur coat before having to give it back to its real owner – and her criminal career begins when she emets a ne’er-do-well named Steve Black (Robert Livingston, oddly cast as a no-goodnik when his best-known role was in a Republic Western series called “The Three Mesquiteers,” in which after a year he was replaced by John Wayne). On their first date they accidentally crash into a car being driven by another young couple, killing him and iinjuring her. Thelma’s initial thought is to report this to the police,but Steve talks her otu of it and the two end up as a sort of bush-league Bonnie and Clyde, staking nightclubs in search of well-to-do couples and then ambushing them with their car and holding them up. (This was in the pre-credit card days when if you wanted a big night on the town you had to pay for it with cash, and a number of their victims flash their bankrolls so ostentatiously it’s lie they’re putting up neon signs saying, ”Rob me – please!”)

Though Steve and Thelma are smart enough to use not only a different car but a different gun on each job – that’s so the police can’t tell from ballistics that the robberies were being committed by the same people – one thing that never occurs to them os to change the color of Thelma’s bright red hair. Just about all the victims recall that the woman robber had red hair,and when one of the stolen cars they used is recovered and a long red hair is found inside it, the police eventually work out the pattern. They take over one of the nightclubs in the area where the criminals are working and staff it full of cops, then wait for the robbers to strike and, when they do, follow them out. There’s a gun battle in which Steve is killed and Thelma is arrested and sentenced to 20 years, and there's a nasty twist in the final scene (the film was written by Richard Goldstone and Marty Brooks) in which we learn that Thelma was pregnant when she was arrested and thus will never see her son, who was born in jail, until 20 years later and thus she’ll miss the boy’s entire childhood. This explains the scene in which we see Thelma wearing a wedding ring; she could be a robber and a crook, but God (or the Production Code) forbid she be an unwed mother!