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6.6/10
Senior Film Conservator
A definitive 6.6/10 rating for a film that redefined the boundaries of cult cinema. Parole Girl remains a cornerstone of transgressive art.
Parole Girl is a weird little 1933 melodrama that is absolutely worth your hour if you love watching people make terrible life choices. It is perfect for anyone who misses the days when movies were only 67 minutes long and moved like a freight train. 🍿
If you can't stand old pre-code logic where a woman marries her worst enemy just to mess with his head, you will probably hate this. But for the rest of us, it is a blast.
Mae Clarke plays Sylvia, a young woman who gets caught up in a silly department store scam. She is not even the mastermind, but Ralph Bellamy's character is super smug and insists on prosecuting her anyway.
Clarke is just great here. She has this tired, sharp look in her eyes that makes you believe she actually spent a year in a miserable cell.
When she gets out on parole, she decides her only goal in life is to completely ruin this guy. And how does she do this? By making him fall in love with her and marrying him under a fake name.
It is so incredibly petty. I love it.
The plot has so many holes you could throw a cat through them, but the movie does not care. It just zips along from one ridiculous situation to the next.
There is a scene early on where Mae Clarke is trying to hide some stolen goods, and the way she fumbles with her purse are so awkward it feels totally unscripted. Like, she almost drops her gloves and just rolls with it.
Ralph Bellamy plays his usual role of "nice guy who is actually a bit of a blockhead." You almost feel bad for how easily he gets played, but then you remember he was a jerk first.
His apartment in this film is hilarious. It looks like a giant, empty hotel lobby with about three chairs scattered around.
At one point, Marie Prevost shows up as a cynical friend, and she honestly steals every single scene she is in. She has this tired, wisecracking energy that makes you wish the whole movie was about her instead.
Some of the dialogue is incredibly sharp, probably because Norman Krasna wrote it. But other times, characters just explain their entire plan out loud to an empty room 😅
It reminds me of those other cheap melodramas of the era, like Defying the Law, where the legal system is basically just a giant plot device to get people mad at each other.
The ending is... well, it is a pre-code movie, so they have to wrap up a massive web of lies and blackmail in about three minutes. It gets very silly, very fast.
But hey, it is short, it is snappy, and Mae Clarke gets to be wonderfully mean for at least forty minutes. That is more than enough for a lazy afternoon.
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