I'll Sell My Life

Rose Hobart needs money for an operation for her brother. She feels responsible for his blindness. When an advertisement appears in Michael Whelan's paper, headlined "I'll sell my life", she takes up the offer: to confess to a murder committed by Joan Woodbury, and be hanged for it. She collects enough money for the operation and is promised more, so she asks Whelan, who is also a lawyer, to be her executor. When she's dead, if the money is given to him, to deliver it and destroy the enclosed letter. If not, to deliver the letter. However, the dead woman was gangster Stanley Fields' girlfriend, and he wants to know what's in the letter.

It's a terrific idea for a story, with a pretty good cast -- it was the last movie Fields made. Some of the dialogue is pretty clunky, though, and Elmer Clifton's direction is not what you'd call sparkling. Clifton had been an actor and Assistant Director for D.W. Griffith, and had done some nice work in the 1920s. However, like a lot of promising directors, talkies had hit him like a brick. After 1929, he didn't direct another movie for four years, and his next after that was in 1935. He had retreated into Poverty Row B movies, mostly horse operas. He was still toiling away in the lower parts of the industry when he died in 1949, aged 59.