In 1950 director John Cromwell made two films about women in varying degrees of incarceration, first "Caged", and then this one. "Caged", dealing with women in prison, is gritty and realistic. "Company She Keeps," about the travails of a parolee, is neither.
As a previous IMDB reviewer stated, it starts off well, with a good scene of the prisoner in front of the parole board. Jane Greer invests her inmate with an interesting combination of hardness and vulnerability and the members of the parole board react to her with, mostly, sympathy mixed in with skepticism from the lone male board member. Then there are some hard hitting scenes with Greer and her sensitive parole officer who is well played by Liz Scott. Nice to see this veteran interpreter of hardened femme fatales in a good gal role for a change and because Scott is a fine, under rated actor she plays it without undue cloyingness.
Then Dennis O'Keefe, playing Scott's newspaper columnist boyfriend, enters the picture and all believability, intensity and interest vanish as we enter the trite realm of the Hollywood Love Triangle. Ketti Frings' dialogue switches from hard edged to purple and John Cromwell's direction goes heavy on the mush and light on the harrowing, with two glorious exceptions, the shoplifting temptation sequence and the great scene in the ladies holding cell which feels like Cromwell was just aching to return to "Caged". Which begs the question, Why didn't he? (Answer below)
Bottom line: You'd think after "Caged", which did well at the box office, that Cromwell could have done a straight on story about the difficulties of parole without mucking it up with this spurious nonsense. Wonder why he did it? Maybe the guy was more commercial than artistic. Give it a C plus.
