THE HOUSE ON 56th STREET (1933)

An average "long suffering heroine" melodrama from the heyday of the genre. Kay Francis is a chorus girl with two admirers: an older sugar daddy (John Halliday) and a younger but still well-off man (Gene Raymond). She agrees to marry Raymond and they live in the big house of the movie title. Halliday takes the rejection OK, but years later, when he has only a short time to live, he confronts her and asks her to return to him. She rejects him again, so he pulls out a gun and threatens to kill himself. Francis struggles with him and the gun goes off, killing Halliday. She is found guilty of manslaughter and put away for 20 years. When she gets out, her husband is dead (in WWI) and her grown daughter (Margaret Lindsay) has been told that Francis died in prison. Her mother-in-law agrees to give her a cash settlement to start a new life, but refuses to let her make contact with her daughter. Francis, whom we're told has a gambling problem, meets up with a oceangoing card sharp (Ricardo Cortez) and they pair up to fleece people, eventually getting a job in New York at a speakeasy that is opening up in the old mansion that once belonged to Francis and her husband. When Lindsay shows up and recklessly loses a lot of money, she winds up shooting Cortez. Francis is ready to take the rap, but the speakeasy boss agrees to cover things up as long as she will stay with him in the house on 56th Street forever. She agrees, escaping punishment in a pre-Code plot twist that would have been impossible a year later. The plot and acting are fine, but because the movie is so short (under 70 minutes), the first half is underdeveloped and rushed through. It is mentioned that Raymond and his rich mother were estranged at one time, but nothing is made of it, as though it were a subplot that got cut before release. Similarly, we know that Francis' father was a riverboat gambler but her gambling past is dealt with in basically one line of dialogue. It wasn't clear to me why Francis couldn't explain her way out of the manslaughter charges better--I guess because then the movie would only be 40 minutes long. Stalwart Warners comic player Frank McHugh gets co-star billing, but only has a couple of scenes early on. Francis and Cortez are the reasons to watch this; both are good doing what they do best: for Francis, wearing lovely costumes and suffering; for Cortez, being an attractive slimeball. [TCM]