HELD FOR MURDER

US, 1932, 64 minutes, Black-and-white.
Conway Tearle, Irene Rich, Mary Carlisle, Kenneth Thomson.
Directed by E. Mason Hopper.


The film opens as a romance on board a ship, middle-aged lawyer and an attractive woman who has a past. The lawyer explains that he has a ward, a young woman, daughter of a friend of his whose mother abandoned them. When the woman sees a picture of the daughter, the audience knows that she is the mother.

In the meantime, she has been having a relationship with a shady man, friend of the lawyer, but is also attracted to the daughter who wants to be a modern and daring young woman. She is about to go on a year’s cruise with friends.

There are complications when the mother warns the shady man to keep away from the daughter and to keep her secret from the lawyer.

The woman needs a copy of a letter she wrote and finds out that the daughter has a key to the apartment and searches for the letter, her being apprehended by the shady man, a gun pulled and its going off. The mother enters at that moment, the daughter leaves for her tour thinking that the wound was only a scratch – but, the police arrive, the man is dead, the mother is arrested, tried and condemned to death. The lawyer tries to help her but, now remorseful, wanting to shield her daughter, she keeps her secret.

There is a long sequence as she walks to execution, the chaplain reciting prayers during the long walk.

Dramatically, there has to be a long walk, because the young woman arrives from her tour, wants to see her mother, discovers the truth, talks with the DA, frantic phone calls to the governor, the phone not being answered – and, of course, a last-minute reprieve and a happy reunion.

The film is reminiscent of variations on the theme of Madame X, Stella Dallas and similar vehicles which featured Kay Francis and Bette Davis during the 1930s.