Lady Gangster

"Lady Gangster" is a fun and fast B movie from Warner Brothers in 1942, and stars Faye Emerson, Julie Bishop, Frank Wilcox, Jackie Gleason, and Ruth Ford (Mrs. Zachary Scott). Emerson plays Dot Burton, who was a decoy in a bank robbery. She winds up getting arrested, and an old friend from childhood (Wilcox) believes she's innocent. She isn't. Before she goes to jail, she steals the $40,000 from her cohorts and leaves it with her landlady.

This prison is like something out of Stage Door, with a common area and people knitting, dancing, and listening to the radio. Two women out to get Dot, Deaf Annie (Dorothy Adams) and her pal Lucy (Ruth Ford) have the lowdown on Dot thanks to Annie's lip-reading (total 2001: A Space Odyssey) and get her into lots of trouble.

Very entertaining.

Was the concept of a female criminal so odd at the time? What about Bonnie Parker? This is a gangster story with the sexes reversed, in any case. The criminal who goes to the slammer is a woman. The prison is nothing compared to the one in "Caged." Julie Bishop, who's very good, wears a rather glamorous uniform.

The movie trots right along, though. It has an excellent cast. Of course, it's fun to see the young Jackie Gleason as a bank robber. He looks kind of naive and cuddly.

Faye Emerson was an excellent actress. She adorned many a B-picture. She wasn't a great beauty: Maybe that's why she never became a major star of movies. She was versatile -- sweet, wisecracking, or evil. One thing that always comes across in her performances: intelligence.

It's the "Women in Cages" of the 40's starring the lean, wide-eyed, prominent cheek-boned, raven-maned beauty Faye Emerson as an aspiring actress who participates in a bank robbery, is caught and then incarcerated for her role but not before hiding the stash from her associates. Whilst in gaol she befriends fellow inmate (Bishop) and is misled in her attempts to get paroled by her jealous nemesis (Ford). Eventually she hatches a plot to escape and recover her share of the booty, but her former accomplices have other ideas.

Emerson is a magnetic personality, arguably better than the B-standard plot, though it's her genuine charm and timing that make her the perfect fit as the slightly naive southern girl, able to improvise in order to make all ends meet. Frank Wilcox co-stars as her would-be suitor whose attempts to keep her out of gaol always seem to fail. Good to see William Hopper (the future "Perry Mason" detective) in a minor role as a radio announcer, and Jackie Gleason as a sympathetic crook.

The momentum is ideal with no time wasted on long, pensive reaction shots or banal and obsolete melodrama - it's light, focused and frenetic and as a consequence, oddly compelling. Emerson, Bishop and Ford all play their roles with aplomb, turning an otherwise mediocre women's prison movie into an entertaining hour.

When I see old-time prison/crime movies, I laugh out loud at some of the things I see, at least compared to films of the last 40 years which may be very profane and sadistically violent but at least they are realistic.

In this film, the lead female character " Dot Burton," played by Faye Emerson, is sent to a women's prison. Inside are all white women except one black, who dances all the time. Talk about a stereotype. Emerson and her best buddy in here look like lesser versions of Rita Hayworth, Look around and you more of these nice, wholesome-looking babes. I guarantee you no prison population has ever looked this good! Yes, there are a few "baddies" and, of course, they are ugly women.

The story also gives us a typical classic movie romance in which a guy falls in love with a "dame" the first time he talks to her. Then she falls for him quickly and but right away, of course, there is a misunderstanding and now the woman hates him. Ten minutes later she loves him again, then hates him, then loves him, etc. etc. No wonder few people in the film world ever took marriage seriously. On screen,it was just one big joke.

Anyway, the story is pretty interesting even if it is more than a bit too dated. The film might be noted more for having two very young actors in here than anything else, guys who went on to because famous on television in the 1950s: Paul Drake and Jackie Gleason. Drake was Perry Mason's assistant on hat hit TV show and Gleason, of course, went on to huge TV fame with "The Honeymooners" and other shows. Here, he is billed as Jackie C. C Gleason.

"Lady Gangster" is only a little over an hour which is fine and the DVD transfer was surprisingly good. This was part of a 4-movie disc called "Mobster Movies," put out by Platinum. I have two of these discs so there are eight films I can watch, movies that, as far as I can tell, were not available on VHS. The other movie I watched on one of the other discs did not have the good picture quality this one had, so they probably vary from film-to-film.

But, despite the drawbacks, these 1930s films are fun to watch because they are fast-moving, short and entertaining.

The "B" films from major studios usually look far more glossy and professional than those turned out from Poverty Row, even when the subject matter is virtually identical. This is not to say that they are necessarily more entertaining. A fair case in point is this cleaned-up version of a gritty Barbara Stanwyck melodrama. It looks slick and it runs smooth, but although competently acted, it doesn't hold a candle to the more earthy original. Mind you, there are compensations. It's always good to see Faye Emerson in a lead role, and she receives great support from Julie Bishop, Dorothy Vaughan, Virginia Brissac and Vera Lewis. But it's Dorothy Adams, in a meaty role for once, who actually steals the acting honors. By contrast, the male players contribute considerably less to the movie's fair-enough success. Roland Drew makes an attempt at the chief villain, while Frank Wilcox takes aim at the hero. Both fall short. Jackie Gleason in a straight role here as one of the gangsters might have had a chance had his role not been so disappointingly small. Ever reliable Charles Wilson gets the nod instead.