Interesting social drama about a spoiled heiress (Maureen O'Sullivan) who owns slum tenements but doesn't care about fixing them up. A boy falls through the rotten stair railing and smashes on to floor. He's paralyzed. Good-hearted Kate (Betty Compson) is also a tenant and does something illegal (prostitution?) to help the boy but gets arrested on the same night that O'Sullivan gets drunk at a party and wanders away from her apartment into the city park where's she's mugged and then picked up for prostitution because she has no identification.
The two women serve 30 days and become friendly with a kindly lawyer (John Warburton) who decides to help them "reform." Of course O'Sullivan falls for him, but he thinks she's a Jane Doe. Compson also falls for him but he only has eyes for O'Sullivan.
Stark lesson in reality for O'Sullivan, who tells her society friends she's been away at a "sanitarium" for a rest cure. But she's determined to mend her ways, pay back her friends, and hold onto the lawyer. Can she do it? O'Sullivan is good as the spoiled society girl, and Compson steals all her scenes as street-smart Kate. Warburton is OK. Co-stars include Montagu Love (the uncle), Mary Doran (fellow prisoner), Martha Mattox (matron), Wally Albright (the boy), Grace Valentine (his mother), and Cornelius Keefe (society boyfriend).
An interesting film for O'Sullivan the same year as her debut as Jane in the Tarzan series. The beginning of Compson's descent from top studios in cheaper films, but she still has star power. Oddly, this film was released through United Artists by Patrician Pictures.
