Displaying items by tag: Robert Kent

CONVICT'S CODE

US, 1939, 62 minutes, Black-and-white.

Robert Kent, Anne Nagel, Sidney Blackmer, Victor Killian, Norman Willis, Maud Eburne, Ben Alexander.

Directed by Lambert Hillyer.

Produced in 1939, this small budget feature resembles some of the gangster films of the early 1930s. Robert Kent, former professional boxer, stage actor, plays a top football player who is framed as the getaway driver at a robbery. He is serving six years in prison, obtaining parole with strict conditions.

Soon in the film, we discover that his benign employer who offers to help is actually the man who framed him, respectable businessman who controls betting and other gambling in the city and who is losing money because of the ballplayer’s success.

So, some cat and mouse, the sympathetic victim, his tough landlady, the persistent parole officer, but a still active chauffeur for the businessman’s sister – and, very quickly, and rather nicely for a film of this time, fall in love. Then the footballer, with the aid of a newspaper journalist friend, starts to track down the witnesses at his case, finally finding one alive or in the US, the confrontation, the witness being murdered.

The businessman’s associate is more determined to get rid of the footballer but the businessman discovers that his sister is in love with him and decides to meet the footballer, the shootout between the two business partners, and in dying, the businessman telling the truth with then sister who goes to the prison, the footballer taken in by his parole officer, who has made an immediate vindication, pardon, and wedding bells are in sight.

Slight, but pleasingly presented and acted.