Recluse

This is a fine example of the Barbara Stanwyck fans would come to know in future years. Her role is tough as nails (remember this production is pre -code) and no-nonsense but still smooth and sexy. One of the best of Stanwyck's early work.

In the beginning of her career, Barbara Stanwyck was in many films that are now available from MGM/UA Home Video as Forbidden Hollywood, Pre-Code dramas. This move is a foolish, little drama of lady bank-robber Stanwyck sent to a woman's penitentiary. The cast is great, but the story is too far-fetched.

Early Barbara Stanwyck who is about as bad as they get. She participates in a bank robbery, manipulates men, lies, and gets sent up to the big house. Plot is somewhat far fetched with little character development other than for Barbara. Story revolves around whether Barbara will again allow Preston Foster to try to save her after trusting him once and having him fail to live up to her expectations. Stanwyck is patterned after the real life experiences and play by Dorothy Mackaye who repeats the formula in Lady Gangster (1942). This movie is worth watching to see the early Stanwyck or the depiction of woman's prison life. Apparently women inmates were allowed to fix up their rooms real nice and change from prison clothes into street clothes during visiting hours -- or so Hollywood would tell us. Sure would have made it easier to escape!

Barbara Stanwyck as a beautiful gun moll who helps her gang commit an armed bank robbery, then gets herself arrested. A young reformer who speaks in front of an "old-fashioned revival" believes in her innocence and tries to help her as they both are from the same hometown and, well, she's not past using her looks to get what she wants. But when, for some reason that I couldn't quite figure out, she actually admits to him she was part of the hold-up, he then assists in sending her to San Quentin. Soon our gal is the "new fish" in prison, and this is a women's prison like no other - if it weren't for the appearance of some older women prisoners in the mix, this would almost look a private girl's school rather than the state Penn! Lounge rocking chairs, newspapers, card games, a "greenhouse" area, a hair stylist, manicures, the "ladies bird club", phonograph record players, and outside - "the sun yard", a regular garden spot. These women can wear their own slinky negligees at night and play records in their room - and one older inmate actually is allowed to keep her own little "lap dog" - h'm.

This film is pretty good - the portrayal of the prison so far-fetched it's actually kind of a hoot to watch. I notice the male prisoners (on the other side of the prison) don't seem to have the same conditions as the women as they are shown in regular jail cells with bars. Anyway, Barbara Stanwyck, one of my favorite actresses from that era, gives her usual star performance and acts up a storm - just great as she plays the world-wise gal who'll play hard ball to get what she wants. A really fun film.

It's a little surprising for those of us who grew up on a double dose of the aging Stanwyck playing an almost hysterical, often villainous matriarch in low-budget theatrical releases or on TV, to see how pale, slender, and vulnerable she was in the early 30s.

Here she's the daughter of a small-town deacon who has suffered through one lecture too many and gone wrong, sent to San Quention for involvement in a bank robbery. (I think -- come to think about it, I'm not sure WHY she was sent up. No evidence links her to complicity in the robbery. All that stands against her is an informal confession to a guy she likes, not made under oath, and easily recanted. Well -- no matter.) Preston Foster is the righteous DA she falls for. He grew up in the same small town, the son of the town drunk, but he straightened up and flew right. Too right, for some tastes. By the way, the small town they grew up in, in which everyone knew everyone else's name, is Benicia, now absorbed into the greater San Francisco Bay Area and it has a population of more than 25,000.

The plot, which comes from a play, carries a lot of familiar real-life baggage and is less interesting than the characters we meet in the course of a kind of tribal study of the ladies' section of San Quentin. There are, first of all, quite a few African-Americans among the inmates, a bit surprising considering the audience the film was aimed at. They're treated mostly humorously but not moreso than the white inmates, and the humor isn't stereotypical. Ruth Donnelly, a familiar face in old movies if there ever was one, is the not entirely unsympathetic warden or whatever her title is. She sometimes carries around a gigantic cockatoo or something on her shoulder which seems to serve no purpose except to scare defiant inmates when it flexes its wings and squawks. Lillian Roth has a prominent supporting part. She's quite pretty, and she sings old songs with more zest than Susan Hayward did in the weeper, "I'll Cry Tomorrow." (Great title, there, Hollywood.) There is the elderly Madam, happily ensconced in her chair, making wisecracks about how all the inmates are now "my girls." Nobody in the movie is thoroughly rotten. If there is a villain, it is the woman who has been born again while in prison and is spiteful, jealous and judgmental. Saints preserve us from zealots. Stanwyck is a surprise in her performance too. She's as good as she's ever been, slouching around in her prison dress, hands in pockets, giving as good as she gets. A grim cigar-smoking dyke is held up for fun without being ridiculed or turned into a monster.

The movie is a curiosity. It's easy to watch, kind of fun, and not badly done. Snippy dialogue, a quick pace, an unpretentious plot, all make it worth a watch.