Virtue

Mae, ordered out of New York after working the streets, comes back instead of taking the train and meets Jimmy, a cab driver. The two marry; Jimmy does not know his wife’s past and Mae cannot bring herself to tell him. Money she lends a friend, a killing, and how easily the city persuades a man to suspect his wife come between them. The film shows Mae neither as a victim nor as somebody to be lectured; the real question is how far a past binds a person. Edward Buzzell’s sixty eight minute American film was made before the censorship rules were tightened. Carole Lombard and Pat O’Brien appear; it was completed in 1932.