classicsoncall Review of Within the Law

Within the Law (1939)

"The law's always good if you have it on your side."

[6/10 · 8 August 2023]

As unlikely as some of these B programmers would be in real life, they often prove to be pretty entertaining. This is one of the good ones, even if you have to stretch the premise to make it work. You've heard stories of people using their prison time to hit the law books, and that's the story here as Mary Turner (Ruth Hussey), wrongfully accused and convicted of a merchandise theft from the store in which she worked, is sent off to state prison for a three-year sentence. You would think a good lawyer could have built a substantial case regarding her innocence, but it didn't look like she even had one. Vowing revenge on her former employer Gilder (Samuel S. Hinds), Mary leaves prison with a handful of schemes meant to make Gilder sorry he ever had her put away. One of them involved marrying the boss's son (Tom Neal), but wouldn't you know it, she gets sappy over the guy and winds up falling in love with him. The earlier gimmick with the arrest of her friend Agnes (Rita Johnson) also didn't seem to make any sense; the store could have called the bank before she left to ensure the check would cover the two grand she wrote it for. Even for 1939, I don't think a major department store would be that trusting. In any event, the resolution to the story gets unnecessarily complicated with a murder and another non-fatal shooting, with outlaw Joe Garson (Paul Kelly) coming clean to admit he killed fellow criminal, English Eddie Morton (Paul Cavanagh) during a planned robbery at the Gilder home, thereby taking Mary off the hook. In hindsight, what makes the players in this drama all the more fascinating is that Paul Kelly was convicted and spent jail time for manslaughter a decade before this film was released, while Tom Neal was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in the death of his wife Barbara Payton in 1965. I guess you had to be there, because I don't know how it would have been involuntary that she caught a bullet to the back of her head.