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The Broken Commandments Synopsis

Young Nella Babard is alone in her cabin, left there temporarily by her parents who have gone to the city. A pair of escaped convicts, fleeing from the police, come upon the cabin and duck inside. One of the pair, "Sporting Chance" Johnson, was imprisoned for a crime he didn't commit and he and Nella find themselves attracted to each other. They sleep together and in the morning Johnson goes out looking for a minister to marry them, but he is caught and sent back to prison. Nella later discovers she is pregnant and, realizing Johnson isn't coming back, agrees to marry a writer she is working for. Three years later the writer, looking for material for a story, travels to the prison and meets a prisoner who is about to get out, and when the writer hears his story, he asks the man to stay at his home until he gets back on his feet. The writer doesn't know that the prisoner is 'Sporting Chance Johnson", and Johnson doesn't know that the writer is now Nella's husband and they have a daughter--Johnson's child. Complications ensue.

Tin Pan Alley Synopsis

After Tommy Breen, a virtuoso violinist, loses his factory job because the employees have extended their lunch hour listening to him, June Norton, a cigarette girl who lives in the same boardinghouse as Tommy, sympathizes with him and becomes the inspiration for his song, "When You Smile with Your Eyes in Mine." Song publisher Simon Berg signs Tommy, and after the song becomes a great success, Tommy forgets June as he surrounds himself with Broadway lowlife, spends extravagantly, and becomes infatuated with Mona Merwin, a musical comedy performer. When Berg tells Tommy to write a song about home, Tommy, never having had one, fails. After June asks Berg to help her save Tommy from himself, he decreases Tommy's royalty checks. Tommy's Broadway friends desert him when the checks stop coming, and Tommy becomes destitute until Berg sends him to a country cottage he has purchased in Flatbush, where Tommy finds June waiting to marry him. Now inspired, Tommy writes a hit song about home.