Unashamed (1932) and Emergency Call (1933)

One thing about both Unashamed (1932) and Emergency Call (1933) is that in both cases someone literally gets away with murder, something that was not allowed to happen once the Motion Picture Code began to be enforced.

I have written previously about Edward L. Cahn (in my blog post of March 26, 2015) and his prolific career. Cahn's Emergency Call is a brisk film (barely more than sixty minutes) in which William Boyd (just before he became Hopalong Cassidy) plays a doctor fighting hospital racketeering, including ambulance chasers, fake accidents and skimming by his future father-in-law, who runs the hospital.  Boyd joins across class lines with his ambulance driver, Steve, who convinces Boyd not to quit and then dies on the operating table because of the inferior ether the racketeers have supplied to the hospital.  The leader of the gangsters is shot dead by Steve’s girlfriend, who is exonerated.  Cahn’s mobile camera (the cinematographer was Roy Hunt) moves through the hospital and the surrounding streets at a fast pace, as the doctors try to save lives, including their own when they are attacked by mental patients and crooks and scammers of all kinds.

In Harry Beaumont’s Unashamed not only does Robert Young get away with murder but his sister, played by Helen Twelvetrees (who had significant roles in the early days of sound) lies about it on the witness stand and her brother gets off.  There are many references to the “unwritten law” (characterized by James Stewart as “a myth” in Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder, 1959).  Young shoots Helen’s lounge lizard lover as much out of suggested incestuous desire as anger that she had spent the night with her lover.  Young’s family friend and lawyer convinces Helen Twelvetrees to portray herself as a tramp on the witness stand – even though she had spent the night with her lover voluntarily in an attempt to get her father to approve their marriage. Beauont (like Cahn, a director mostly of B pictures) keeps strictly to interiors in this film, emphasizing the claustrophobic and isolated life of a wealthy family.

Kudos to Turner Classic Movies for showing these two fascinating films.