Behind Stone Walls

Priscilla Dean married District Attorney Robert Elliott months after his first wife died giving birth. that son, Eddie Nugent, thinks she is his mother. When her lover, Robert Ellis, tells her he wants to end the affair, she shoots him. Nugent walks in moments later, tells her to leave, and is trying to make it appear that a burglar shot Keene, when butler George Cheseboro walks in and calls the police. Eddie refuses to peach on his mother and is condemned to life imprisonment. Meanwhile, Cheseboro discovers letters Miss Dean has written to Keene....

There are a few plot holes in this Poverty Row shorty, but the story is basically sound, and visually well directed by Frank Strayer. The same cannot be said about the line readings. Miss Dean is particularly wooden in her early scenes, everyone is wooden and Cheseboro's sides seem to have been punctuated at random. It pretty much put paid to Miss Dean's attempted comeback. She had been off the screen since 1927, before making three talkies in 1931 and 1932; this was the third. I'm not sure how she spent the rest of her life, but she lived well into her 90s. I hope they were good years.