Hold Your Man

Ruby falls for Eddie, a small-time con man; she works men herself, so the two of them are in the same line. A blackmail scheme goes wrong, Eddie kills the mark by accident and runs, and Ruby takes the fall. She is sent to a women’s reformatory, where she finds out she is pregnant. Sam Wood’s MGM production was the third of the six films Jean Harlow and Clark Gable made together, written by Anita Loos and Howard Emmett Rogers. It is a picture made before the Hays Code was enforced in earnest, and you can tell: the pregnancy, the reformatory and how both leads actually make their living all stand without softening. It opened in New York on 30 June 1933 and took a million dollars against a budget of two hundred and sixty-six thousand.