Allotment Wives

I mentioned at the start of the month when I did the first post on Kay Francis being this month's Star of the Month on TCM that she had been featured in Summer Under the Stars back in August, and I had recorded the movie Allotment Wives. That movie is finally showing up in Francis' spotlight, tonight at 12:45 AM (so technically early Tuesday in the east, and Monday night in every other time zone).

The movie was released in late 1945, but presumably conceived at the start of the year, before both Germany and Japan surrendered in World War II. A docudrama-style voiceover at the beginning informs us about the Office of Dependency Benefits, which aided families on the home front during the War. When the men would go off to fight, they would surrender some of their pay, since they presumably didn't need it at the front (although of course when they had leave they could certainly use it). The ODB would match this money and give it to the wives/families of the soldiers, a practice called "allotment checks". Naturally, this huge pot of money was ripe for scams, especially with all those quickie marriages before the soldiers went off to fight. Supposedly, crime syndicates were getting women to sign up for bigamous marriages in order to get multiple allotment checks, with the syndicate raking off some of the money. General Gilbert (Jonathan Hale) asks Col. Martin (Paul Kelly), who had been a reporter before the war, to do some undercover investigating to find the people running the syndicates, not the women at the bottom cashing the checks.

Sheila Seymour (Kay Francis) runs a swanky beauty salon by day, and operates a charity canteen for soldiers about to go off to war by night. But we see right away that this isn't all she's doing. She's got a neat revolving wall in her salon office which is a secret entrance to the syndicate office. There, she and her right-hand man Whitey Colton (Otto Kruger) are running one of the allotment check scams, and doing it fairly ruthlessly as they have someone bumped off early on.

However, thanks to the presence of the Production Code, we know that poor Sheila is going to get her comeuppance by the end of the movie. Two things cause this to happen. First is Sheila's daughter Connie (Teala Loring). Connie doesn't know what her mom really does; at least, she only knows about the legitimate businesses. Connie is supposed to be off at an exclusive boarding school. But she's rebelling, showing up at a restaurant Mom visits and getting quite drunk. This understandably displeases Mom to no end.

The other problem comes at the canteen. One of the volunteers, Gladys Smith (Gertrude Michael), thinks she recognizes Sheila as some other women, making things mildly awkward for Sheila at the canteen. Of course, we know that Gladys is right. Sheila grew up poor and was determined never to be poor again, changing her name after getting out of the reform school she and Gladys were in together, and making a new life for herself. But Gladys is here, and working for another syndicate. She's able to blackmail Sheila in the worst possible way.

Allotment Wives is an interesting little movie, even if it never really rises above B movie status. This was several years after Francis left Warner Bros., and her movie career was nearly at an end, being reduced to working on Poverty Row. But she still had enough influence that she was able to get a producer's credit, and we get some folks here who were never stars of A movies, but solid supporting actors like Kruger. And the plot is pretty good for a B movie. One thing that did amuse me was a scene of Sheila slapping Connie that seemed as though it could have been lifted straight from Mildred Pierce, although Mildred Pierce only premiered a few weeks before Allotment Wives.

If you want an interesting example of the way in which B movies could be pretty good, you could do a lot worse than to watch Allotment Wives.