... in this rather confusing entry from Republic Pictures and director Bernard Vorhaus.
Mary Stephens (Helen Mack) and Jerry Flynn (Lew Ayres) are two poor kids in love in New York City. Jerry has a bunch of ruffian friends and only works sporadically. Mary's home life looks like Joan Crawford's in the first part of Mannequin - Mom is beat down by life, dad's hobbies are drinking and making more siblings for Mary that he won't support, and they all live in a run down tenement. She decides she can't wait around for Jerry to make good and so she decides to become the kept woman of the world's most unthreatening looking gangster, Wire Arno (Victor Varconi). This is not a decision she makes cavalierly.
Jerry decides to show Mary he can make good - more for revenge than to get her back - and becomes a hard selling newsboy. He's good at hawking papers and gets his gang of ruffian friends in on the enterprise. And then a confusing twist - He marches into the office of the newspaper owner and says that with a turn to yellow journalism, not just in sales but in content, he can up circulation dramatically and wants a dollar for every account in increased circulation. The surprise here - The owner of a major newspaper looks at a newsboy with no experience in publishing, editing, or writing and says- "OK then". And thus suddenly Jerry is running the newspaper.
So soon Jerry is in the high life and as part of that high life runs into Mary and her gangster boyfriend, who turns out to be much more threatening than he looks. Complications ensue.
Lew Ayres is the only big name in this, and both he and the rest of the rather obscure cast acquit themselves well, it is just the several confusing plot turns that seem like hand waving to get the plot to where it wants to go that hold it back. For example, as I mentioned before, the movie needs to have Jerry doing well, so they have him hired to run the newspaper where he had formerly been a newsboy even though he had nothing in his background or experience that would lead you to believe that he would be a success at that.
There is one rather odd feature of the film - In the couple of scenes where somebody takes a direct punch to the face or body, the camera pulls away and you only see an insinuation of the blow. I'm not sure if that was because of some aspect of the production code with which this film was dealing.
