A Barreira

Paul Muni is a Mexican-American who has graduated from night law school, but soon learns that a law degree doesn't make you a lawyer. He heads out of town and gets a job as a bouncer at Eugene Pallette's bar. He quickly becomes so invaluable that Pallette cuts him in for a quarter of the take. Meanwhile, Pallette's wife, Bette Davis, develops an itch for him.

Muni is terrific, as always, and the cast, which includes Margaret Lindsay, Henry O'Neill, and Soledad Jiménez, work very well in this tale about a man trying to crash through the racial barrier the right way. That the film makers got this much through the Production Code is a major accomplishment, but this needs to have been a pre-code movie, with all the dirt and sluttishness that implies.