Evelyn Brent is a bartender in a Havana bar when rumrunner Charles Bickford swaggers in and carries her away to Florida. They're happy with each other, slanging by day and making love by night. But she worries how long it will last. How long before he tires of her or she of him, or he gets killed in a shootout with Prohibition agents? Then in come a bunch of Christian ministers holding a convention. Among them is Conrad Nagel, who falls for her on sight.... and since Bickford is gone on a 'business" trip, she likes him.
I am a sucker for Evelyn Brent from the silents and the talkies, through her last appearances with the Bowery Boys. There's a sad reality to her performances that seems genuine as she warily treads the dim corners of the demi-monde. Pair her with Charles Bickford at his early, emphatic best, and you have something. Add in Roland Young as the inevitable alcoholic doctor in these Sadie Thompson knockoffs, and you really have something.
Here's a movie in which Conrad Nagel as the naive boy of 34 is not out of place. His commonplace good looks, wan presence and, as a friend of mine notes, "the looks of Leslie Howard without the raw Latin sexuality" offer Miss Brent a redemption that Bickford can't: respectability, Christianity, and no fear that she will be called in to identify a bullet-riddled corpse. But is that enough for a girl who's been around the block and enjoyed the ride?
I am a sucker for Evelyn Brent from the silents and the talkies, through her last appearances with the Bowery Boys. There's a sad reality to her performances that seems genuine as she warily treads the dim corners of the demi-monde. Pair her with Charles Bickford at his early, emphatic best, and you have something. Add in Roland Young as the inevitable alcoholic doctor in these Sadie Thompson knockoffs, and you really have something.
Here's a movie in which Conrad Nagel as the naive boy of 34 is not out of place. His commonplace good looks, wan presence and, as a friend of mine notes, "the looks of Leslie Howard without the raw Latin sexuality" offer Miss Brent a redemption that Bickford can't: respectability, Christianity, and no fear that she will be called in to identify a bullet-riddled corpse. But is that enough for a girl who's been around the block and enjoyed the ride?