Marked Woman

Mary Dwight works at a nightclub, employed to bring men in. Johnny Vanning, who owns it, controls every place like it in the city. When a customer is killed, the district attorney David Graham asks the women at the club to testify. The price of talking is made explicit: Mary's face is cut. Lloyd Bacon directs. Bette Davis plays Mary and Humphrey Bogart plays the prosecutor. The story comes from a real case. In 1936 the prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey convicted Lucky Luciano in New York of running a prostitution operation, and the backbone of the case was the testimony of women who agreed to speak. The film follows that file, but under the Production Code it can never name what the women do. They are only nightclub hostesses. Its most retold scene came out of that same pressure. The makeup the studio prepared for Mary after the beating was too clean and too pretty. Bette Davis left the lot, went to her own doctor, had her face bandaged as an actual injury would be, and came back like that. The dressing on screen is a physician's work, not the Warner Bros. makeup department's. Who it is for: viewers who like thirties Warner crime pictures and Bette Davis. Who it is not for: censorship means the centre of the story is never stated, and without knowing that, some scenes make no sense.