ACCORDING TO MRS. HOYLE (1951)

Mrs. Hoyle (Spring Byington), a much loved teacher, has just retired and looks forward to a quiet life in the room she has rented for years at a run-down hotel, where her neighbors follow her example of giving to the poor. However, Morganti (Anthony Caruso), a reformed gangster, has just bought the building and has plans to boot out all the long-term renters and refurbish the place. Seeing Mrs. Hoyle as a kindly old soul, Morganti lets her stay, and she talks him into letting a young chorus girl named Angela Brown stay as well. Eddie, an associate of Morganti's, realizes that Hoyle is his mother; his father took him years ago when the two split up. He doesn't tell her but he starts to fall for Angela. Soon, under Mrs. Hoyle's influence, all of Morganti's thug buddies start to reform, even following her example of giving to charity, except for Rogan who ropes a reluctant Eddie into helping him pull off a payroll robbery on the night of the grand reopening of the hotel. After some gunplay, Rogan hides the money in Mrs. Hoyle's fur coat which is hanging in her closet (she is down at the reopening). When the cops close in on the two, Rogan is shot and killed, and Eddie is seriously wounded and falls into a coma. When a police search reveals the money in Mrs. Hoyle's coat, she is arrested and painted by the prosecutors as a kind of Ma Barker figure. Her protestations of innocence are hurt by the fact that the cops also find stolen jewels in her jewel box and she can't explain how they got there.

This is a fairly bland crime drama with some interesting plot points. First of all, Morganti, the former crime boss, actually does reform, something that lots of crooks claim to want to do in movies but rarely follow through on. Second, Mrs. Hoyle actually does wind up on trial—I assumed that, as in other movies like this, things would get straightened out before the sweet and obviously innocent old lady has to face a judge. I like Byington and she's the main reason to watch, but some of the relatively unknown B-actors in support are also fine: Caruso, Brett King as Eddie (who does a nice job teetering between the lure of the straight life and loyalty to Rogan who saved his life in the past), Robert Karnes as Rogan, and Harry Lauter as Mrs. Hoyle's attorney. As for title, it comes from a once-common phrase that referred to Edward Hoyle who, in the 1700s, was one of the first people to publish books on the rules of card games. "According to Hoyle" means you’re doing something exactly by the rules or established standards. Pictured are Byington and Lauter. [TCM]