It's a musical! It's performance art! It's a romance! It's a melodrama AND a comedy! It's a gangster picture! It's a morality tale AND an economics lesson! And it's about 15 minutes longer than it needs to be.
Mr. Morris (Harry Carey) owns a department store where he employs many men and women recently released from prison. Two such people are Joe Dennis (George Raft) and Helen Roberts (Sylvia Sidney). They meet at the store and fall in love. One night, they make a sudden decision to marry. The problem is that Joe is open about his status of being an ex con, but Helen hides that she is the same, and furthermore she is still on parole and her marrying is a violation of that parole.
Joe begins to wonder about his wife when he catches her in a couple of lies and when she won't let him look at a stack of papers that look like love letters but are in fact her parole cards. What he thinks might be another man is just Helen hiding her status as an ex-con. Meanwhile, baddie Barton McLane has wandered over from Warner Brothers to try and tempt all of the ex-cons working at Morris's Department Store into robbing it.
What makes it odd? The film opens with a half-sung, half-spoken, somewhat metatextual song that seems to be criticizing capitalism - odd for a production code era film. Also, there's a torch song number towards the middle that really has nothing to do with the plot. Then, when some of the ex cons have a reunion on Christmas day, there's another metatextual song that seems to be the ex-cons waxing nostalgic about their time in jail.
What's good about it? Raft and Sidney have great chemistry and it's one of Raft's better performances. Also, Warren Hymer is being well used as the rather dense but true friend of Raft who is having trouble figuring out Raft's moods.
This reminded me at times of a Greek Chorus mixed with an operetta, and a dash of Damon Runyon. Of course the director was the famous ( and quirky) Fritz Lang reviving one of his favorite themes of decent people being persecuted by the law. He made another film the year before with a similar theme starring Spencer Tracy and Silvia Sydney called "Fury". It was interesting to see a young Bob Cummings in one of his first films as one of the ex-cons. I wish they had given him more to do. If you are familiar with and a fan of Fritz Lang's work, you might like this. Or if you'd like to see just about every well-known character actor in Hollywood at the time all in one film, you may be entertained. Otherwise this film is an acquired taste.
