Frisco Jenny

Jenny loses her people in the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 and finds herself pregnant. After the birth she places the child with a wealthy couple. Years pass; under the protection of a corrupt politician Jenny becomes the best known brothel keeper in the city and gets into other dark business as well. The film builds this not as a story of ruin but as the price of a mother’s decisions, and towards the end the shape of the tragedy is almost classical. William A. Wellman directed, with Ruth Chatterton in the lead and Louis Calhern in the cast. It belongs to the free stretch before the Hays rules tightened. The Warner Bros. production opened on 30 December 1932; the record gives the year as 1933.