Ladies of Washington

Eight or so young women share a house in Washington during the wartime housing shortage. One them, Sheila Ryan, is a mess. She faked a suicide attempt because she discovered that her older boyfriend was married -- his wife objected. Miss Ryan and others begin dating doctors, until Miss Ryan discovers the suave Anthony Quinn. He represents himself as a source for gossip columnists. Actually, he's a foreign spy. When he takes some time out from a date with Miss Ryan for some skullduggery, he gets shot and when Miss Ryan takes him to one of the doctors, he dies on the operating table.

It's a well-made little thriller with a contemporary background, like THE MORE THE MERRIER, but with spies and a bit of wartime paranoia instead of being a romantic comedy. It's directed by Louis King, the brother of the better known Henry King. Although he never got out of the programmers and B westerns, he was an efficient and effective director who helmed more than eighty features from 1921 through 1958, then went into TV work. The story is that after his 1946 western SMOKY was released, he stopped his brother on the 20th Century-Fox lot one day and told him that his picture had just made back all the money that Henry's movie, WILSON, had lost.

An attractive young lady, who is bitter and selfish, plays the field with as many of the right type of men as possible, quickly discarding them when they have served a purpose, or have a bleak outlook to the future.

Due to the housing shortages in Washington during WW2, she is forced to move into a rooming house, with many happy and generous girls, who soon take a disliking to the newcomer.

She meets up with a dashing foreign man, a very young Anthony Quinn in one of his earliest roles, and finds herself in trouble too deep to cry her way out of.

A quickie production from the early days of WW2, highlighting how women in the community can help the war effort, plus how dangerous it is to talk too much, in case of foreign agents.