Midnight Mary

On trial for murder and waiting for the verdict, Mary Martin reads her own file, and the film winds back from there: poverty, an accusation of theft, reform school, no work, and finally the only living available to her inside a gang. The film is not interested in telling the story of a criminal woman. It is interested in how few options she was left: at every step it shows the doors closing, and it never presents the crime as an individual choice. The form belongs to pre-Code Hollywood: short running time, fast transitions, frank dialogue and a tone that refuses to moralise. William A. Wellman directed. In the same years he made Heroes for Sale and Wild Boys of the Road, and the three together form a hard sequence about Depression America. Loretta Young plays Mary, Ricardo Cortez the gang leader and Franchot Tone the wealthy lawyer. Who it is for: viewers who like the pre-Code period and woman-centred crime melodrama. Who it is not for: anyone wanting a long narrative. The film runs under seventy minutes and most characters are drawn with a single trait.