Mary Burns, la fugitive

Forgotten, well written and acted, gritty crime drama. Sidney is excellent as usual. The big surprise is Brian Donlevy, soon to be typecast as western villains until attaining bigger starring or co-starring roles in the 40s, playing Spike, a soft=spoken gangster, devoted to his boss Alan Baxter, menacing in his quiet.

Sylvia Sidney is a dope who falls for a city slicker only to find out he's a crook. She gets convicted for aiding and abetting. After her prison break, the cops use her to ferret out the boyfriend she now hates. She lands a job washing dishes in a hospital and meets snowblind explorer Melvyn Douglas.

Maybe I've seen Sylvia Sidney suffering in far too many low-class weepers, demonstrating that the Shomin-Gekim was not a Japanese genre. Here's proof that there were lower-class people in the American audiences, and they liked to think their lives were as interesting and worthy of making ridiculous stories about as snoots on Park Avenue. Even the occasional swell might take off his top hat to look at a shop girl, were she pretty as Miss Sidney. Miss Sidney is a dope, the guys on the side of the law are as heartless to the poor girl as gangsters, and it's so obvious that she's a good girl that Melvyn Douglas can tell it with his eyes bandaged.

Miss Sidney needed to make more comedies. Alas, she didn't get to do that for many years in the movies. She was too good at being sad, and shy and oppressed, and making the audience wait to hear her break down and cry out at the unfairness of it all, which she finally does here about eight minutes before the end of this one.

Director William K. Howard tells the movie in a straightforward manner, and it isn't until about 50 minutes into it that he unleashes his quick-cut Dutch Angle style to let you know something exciting is about to happen. It's an awful burden that Miss Sidney has to carry this whole movie, but she does so.

When she was young and in her salad days Sylvia Sidney seemed to be cast as innocents with lives buffeted by time and circumstance. In the title role of Mary Burns, Fugitive rural girl Sylvia who works in a coffee shop has fallen for smooth talking city guy Alan Baxter.

She learns the hard way that he's one of the FBI's public enemies when she gets brought in on a holdup and Baxter escapes and she's caught. After trial and conviction she's sent to women's prison for 15 years.

In this film everybody manipulates Sylvia, her cellmate brassy Pert Kelton, G-man Wallace Ford, and the rest of law enforcement as an 'escape' is arranged hoping she'll lead the cops to Baxter. But she really doesn't know anything and can't convince anyone of that fact.

There are some real good performances here from Sidney and from Baxter as one cold villain with one weakness, the hots for Sylvia. Just as cold and villainous but without the libido problems is Brian Donlevy in one of his earliest roles. He meets quite an end.

With the part of the arranged escape that doesn't go quite as planned some elements of White Heat are here.

This one is a crackerjack sleeper from Paramount.

MARY BURNS, FUGITIVE (Paramount, 1935), directed by William K. Howard, ranks one of the finer prison related themed crime stories from the 1930s. Not as intense as the more famous I AM A FUGITIVE FROM A CHAIN GANG (Warner Brothers, 1932) starring Paul Muni, nor one taken from a stage play as THE LAST MILE (Tiffany, 1932) featuring Preston Foster, MARY BURNS, FUGITIVE stars Sylvia Sidney in the title role of an innocent girl who becomes a victim of circumstance through no fault of her own.

Mary Burns (Sylvia Sidney), owner of a roadside coffee cup shop next door to a garage/gas station in the country, awaits the arrival of Babe Wilson (Alan Baxter), an oil salesman whom she sees every three or four weeks. Upon his arrival, Babe, a man Mary knows little about, proposes marriage to her and wants her to immediately leave everything behind and accompany him to Canada. Minutes later, police arrive to arrest Babe, exposed as a wanted gangster and cold-blooded killer. Shooting his partner, Joe (Norman Willis), so not to reveal the location of the stolen bonds, Babe makes his daring escape, leaving Mary to face arrest. During her trial by jury, Mary is cross-examined by an attorney, revealing she knew nothing about Babe Wilson except that she loved him. Because of poor sufficient evidence, Mary is found guilty and sentenced to serve 15 years in the penitentiary. Unable to get parole for disclosing Wilson's whereabouts to Harper (Wallace Ford) from the parole board, Mary, not wanting to spend any more time behind bars, talks Goldie Gordon (Pert Kelton), her cellmate, into joining her in a well-planned prison break. Now living in a tenement apartment somewhere in the city with Goldie, and flat broke, Mary, alias Alice Brown, takes a chance in obtaining a night job as dishwasher at the Mercy Hospital. While there, Mary meets patient, Barton Powell (Melvyn Douglas), an noted explorer with bandaged eyes due to snow blindness he got in Tibet. He not only likes the sound of her voice, but her coffee as well. When Spike (Brian Donlevy), locates Mary with intentions of taking her back to Babe, Mary escapes to Kansas, only to be pursued by Harper, hoping she will lead him to Babe before any further hold-ups and killings occur. Others in the cast include: Esther Dale (Kate); Daniel L. Haynes (Jeremiah, Powell's butler); Cora Sue Collins (Dorothy); and George Chandler, among others.

An exciting story that keeps viewers interest for its entire 84 minutes. Alan Baxter, in his motion picture debut, gives a promising start to his movie career playing a hooded gangster. Unlike movie tough guys as James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, George Raft and later Humphrey Bogart who all achieved popularity through their wide-range of performances, Baxter never became a top-rated actor in the Alan Ladd mode. Though he did a distinctive way of talking as well as some leading roles, mostly in second-rate features, Baxter appeared mainly in either supporting or minor parts throughout his movie or TV career. Baxter worked again opposite Sylvia Sidney in THE TRAIL OF THE LONESOME PINE (1936), but had little to do, especially when the major male co-stars were Henry Fonda and Fred MacMurray. Melvyn Douglas, who appears 39 minutes into the start of the story, gives a fine performance as a bickering hospital patient who softens himself to his new assistant, Mary, unaware of her troubled past. Pert Kelton, better known as a sassy blonde in comedies, is surprisingly cast as a tough prison inmate, and does it so well. A pity she didn't get enough stronger roles like this to display her acting ability than just a secondary comedienne. Like many movies of the type, MARY BURNS, FUGITIVE doesn't disappoint. The car radio playing to the tune, "I'm in the Mood for Love" introduced from EVERY NIGHT AT EIGHT (1935), is vocalized by Frances Langford.

Though MARY BURNS, FUGITIVE did have enough commercial television exposure through much of the 1960s and 70s, like Sylvia Sidney's other Paramount film releases of the 1930s, this film remains overlooked and forgotten. Never distributed on video cassette, MARY BURNS, FUGITIVE got its long overdue broadcast on cable television's Turner Classic Movies (TCM premiere: August 5, 2019). (***)

Sylvia Sidney is Mary, who runs a coffee shop. Her mysterious boyfriend shows up, and says he has to be in Canada that night. She agreees to marry him, but then there's a big shootout, and Mary is off to jail. Brian Donlevy (way before Beau Geste or Glass Key) is in here as Spike. When Mary breaks out of jail, the gang thinks it's a trap to catch the thugs. and maybe it is... Melvyn Douglas is a grouchy patient in the hospital where Mary gets a job. The gangsters and the cops catch up with her, so its a race to see who can catch who first. Sidney was married to bigshot publisher Bennett Cerf (for a whole six months) and starred in Hitchcock's Sabotage the year after this one. Directed by Bill Howard. he started in the silents, and continued into the 1940s. This one is pretty good. some typical gangster movie bits, but it all works.