Midnight Mary

In this 1933 Willam Wellman film, we begin in a courtroom at a murder trial. A prosecutor is giving his summation directly to the camera, so in effect we the audience are the jury. The camera then moves in on the accused, a beautiful young woman who is nonchalantly reading Cosmopolitan magazine. She goes into the clerk's office to await the verdict, and looking at the spines of the bound court records, embossed with their years, she remembers back to how she got in this mess, and we learn her story in flashback.

That's a crackerjack opening, and we learn that Midnight Mary, played well by Loretta Young, barely out of her teens, has had a hard-knock life. Orphaned as a young girl, in and out of jail, she eventually becomes the moll of a gangster (Richardo Cortez). During a robbery of an after-hours club, she meets a blue-blooded attorney (Franchot Tone). Deciding to try to make it straight, she accepts his help and works as a secretary in his firm. But when she realizes her past could jeopardize his reputation, she breaks up with him, telling him that she was playing him for a sucker, and ends up back with Cortez. But when Cortex realizes that Tone is a witness to a crime, he goes gunning for him, and Young kills Cortez to protect her true love.

This is yet another example of a standard double-bill story dressed up a bit by Wellman's touches. The economy of storytelling through visuals is masterful, and Wellman employs a lot of tricks he learned in the silents. Also, the use of wipes to transition scenes gives the film a compelling motion. And I can't say that I'd ever seen a Loretta Young picture before, but she was very good playing a familiar character. Wellman lights her to maximum effect, and she glows with inner light.

Since this was a pre-Code film, there are some naughty bits, such as an unwed mother (Mary's sidekick, Una Merkel), and just the tone of the film in general. In those years, from 1929 to 1934, before films were required to be approved by the Hays Office, female characters were far more interesting, and could express sexuality.