MONEY MADNESS

US, 1948, 73 minutes, Black-and-white.
Hugh Beaumont, Francis Rafferty, Harlan Wade, Cecil Weston, Ida Moore.
Directed by Sam Newfield (as Peter Stewart).

Money Madness opens with a young woman being condemned to prison for 10 years. Then it goes into flashback – and arrives at the ending of the film without the sentence, audiences hoping that, instead, all will be well.

A comment is made about people who arrive on buses and the focus is on a middle-aged man, played by Hugh Beaumont, getting off a bus at an unintended stop, going to a bank and putting money in a personal safe. He then becomes a taxi driver in the town, becoming friends with young woman (the woman sentenced at the beginning of the film), takes her out, comes home, visits, rather sweeps her off her feet and marries her.

He is revealed to be a cad, people arriving in town to claim money from him, the revelation that he was a partner in a bank robbery. He also swindles the young woman, claiming that he is not divorced from his former wife, is hostile to the young woman’s aunt, something of a cantankerous hypochondriac, and poisons her so that her niece will inherit her house and everything in it (where his planted the money).

The niece’s lawyer is sympathetic, confronts the villain, but he is clever in setting up the young woman, menacing her with the gun, and allowing her to be arrested for the murder of her aunt – leading to the sentence of 10 years.

The film retains its interest with the twists of its plot.