There's a good deal to be said in favor of uninspired B features like "Convict's Code." They filled the bottom bill of A features like, oh, "The Wizard of Oz" or "Drums Along the Mohawk." Sometimes visitors skipped the B features but mostly they were enjoyable and distracting preludes. They made the main features look brilliant by means of what psychologists call "successive contrast."
This is a good example of the type. It's fast, not a moment is wasted, the actors hit their marks, speak their lines the way actors spoke lines in 1939, with conviction but with few errors. The sets are sparse, the dialog instrumental. The whole point was to grind out a short and inexpensive movie of no discernible quality except the ability to make a few dollars for a poverty row house like Monogram -- best known for John Wayne westerns during the 30s.
It succeeds. Robert Kent has been unjustly framed for a crime. Sidney Blackmer rigged the jury in order to get Kent sent to jail for reasons having to do with betting on a football game.
Released on parole, Kent takes a lot of chances trying to track down the corrupted jury. He never does find any, and the focus of the movie shifts to his love affair with Anne Nagel who, by coincidence is Sidney Blackmer's favorite little sister.
Nagel knows nothing of Blackmer's criminal interference with the judicial process, and in fact she and Blackmer are quite affectionate towards each other. Not to the extent that Tony Camonte was affectionate towards HIS sister, Anne Dvorak in "Scarface," but still -- Well, there are secrets kept and intrigues plotted and a murder or two takes place but it all ends happily.
Nagel deserves a few lines. She's attractive in a curiously ordinary way. But her voice is magnetic. Her diction is perfect, her phonemes immaculate, as if she had spent her youth in one elocution class after another. She firm, candid, innocent, yet a take-charge sort of woman. It's an appealing portrait.
In the end it's a modest and routine story of a man on parole and the ways in which that liminal state encumbers his attempt to prove his own innocence.
This is a good example of the type. It's fast, not a moment is wasted, the actors hit their marks, speak their lines the way actors spoke lines in 1939, with conviction but with few errors. The sets are sparse, the dialog instrumental. The whole point was to grind out a short and inexpensive movie of no discernible quality except the ability to make a few dollars for a poverty row house like Monogram -- best known for John Wayne westerns during the 30s.
It succeeds. Robert Kent has been unjustly framed for a crime. Sidney Blackmer rigged the jury in order to get Kent sent to jail for reasons having to do with betting on a football game.
Released on parole, Kent takes a lot of chances trying to track down the corrupted jury. He never does find any, and the focus of the movie shifts to his love affair with Anne Nagel who, by coincidence is Sidney Blackmer's favorite little sister.
Nagel knows nothing of Blackmer's criminal interference with the judicial process, and in fact she and Blackmer are quite affectionate towards each other. Not to the extent that Tony Camonte was affectionate towards HIS sister, Anne Dvorak in "Scarface," but still -- Well, there are secrets kept and intrigues plotted and a murder or two takes place but it all ends happily.
Nagel deserves a few lines. She's attractive in a curiously ordinary way. But her voice is magnetic. Her diction is perfect, her phonemes immaculate, as if she had spent her youth in one elocution class after another. She firm, candid, innocent, yet a take-charge sort of woman. It's an appealing portrait.
In the end it's a modest and routine story of a man on parole and the ways in which that liminal state encumbers his attempt to prove his own innocence.