Alias Mary Smith

Blanche Mehaffey is accused of killing the prosecutor who put her brother in the gas chamber. She says that she turned over the real murderer's "book" to him, and now he's dead. Fortunately, John Darrow, pulled in on drunk & disorderly, comes to her rescue in this poorly made Pre-code.

The line readings by Miss Mehaffey are pretty poor, with lots of dead air, and no one really shines; the best is probably Henry Walthall as the District Attorney interrogating her. Neither are the two more than bystanders in the cracking of the case. In sum, this is a short (52 minutes in the print I saw) Pre-code with little to recommend it. The limits of its tawdriness (besides people getting involved in murder) are some drinking, and some cops and photo-snapping reporters barging in wherever they like, whenever they like.

the director is E.Mason Hopper. He started behind the megaphone in Snakeville comedies in 1911. By the mid-twenties, he was directing Marion Davies features and UP IN MABEL'S ROOM. Sound hit him hard, like a lot of directors, and he soon fell into Poverty Row. After 1938, he couldn't get a job as an assistant director. He appeared uncredited in a few movies in the 1940s. He died in 1967, aged 81.