Unfortunately, I've got a lot of movies on my DVR that aren't on DVD, and even not on streaming. I've recently done a few posts on films that seem to be on streaming services somewhere or other although the DVD is out of print, but I generally prefer to do posts on movies that readers have the chance to watch for themselves. But because of all those movies taking up space on the DVR, I'm going to have to start doing the odd post here and there on old films that don't currently seem to be available anywhere. (However, as I mentioned when the old Filmstruck service shut down, I don't understand why Warner Home Video or whatever corporate entity runs the old Warner Archive now can't take all those movies from the library Ted Turner bought and make them a streaming service, since the Warner Archive selections have to have been digitized for putting on DVD or Blu-ray.) In any case, today's post is one of those movies, Strange Justice.
Kearney (Richard Bennett) is a lawyer in New York who meets a friend, banker Henry Judson (Reginald Denny), at a club where Rose (Marian Abbott) is the hat-check girl. Rose has a boyfriend named Wally (Norman Foster) who recently got out of prison and is trying to reform his life and go straight. Meanwhile, Henry seems to like Rose, so she tries to see if he wouldn't be willing to give Wally a job as a chauffeur. Indeed, Wally does get that job, but they don't all live happily ever after.
The problem is that, at the bank, Judson is embezzling money! And he's just been found out by another guy at the bank, Waters (Irving Pichel), who decides that that the thing to do about an embezzling colleague is to blackmail the co-worker. Nice people, aren't they? Meanwhile, Wally nearly jeopardizes his job when he spots Judson putting the moves on Rose, and thinks that perhaps the think to do is to slug his boss. In another odd twist, Judson basically says "Oh well" and wishes Wally and Rose happiness in their marriage.
But there's still that embezzlement going on. Waters and Judson come up with a scheme in which Judson will fake his own death and make it look as though Wally killed him through reckless driving, and have Wally caught with some of the embezzled money that he can't quite explain how he got, or at least not with any corroborating witnesses. This being a 1930s movie, it sends Wally not only back to prison, but to death row. However, since he's not guilty of anything more than being a dope, we will eventually get a happy ending.
Strange Justice is decidedly a B movie, from RKO, who didn't have as good B movies as Warner Bros., nor as polished as MGM. Still, Strange Justice is an interesting little effort from the pre-code era.
I can see, however, how it never made its way to DVD. Nobody would have thought there was much potential for it to sell in the pre-MOD days, and even once the Warner Archive started, there were a lot of other movies that would be more deserving of a MOD release. There's also no real star here to build a box set around (even if I think I saw a Universal Reginald Denny set once), so those old four-movie sets that Warner Home Video were putting out wouldn't do, either.
In fact, Strange Justice is the sort of movie that would be great for a streaming service, even one of the ad-supported services like TubiTV. But then, I don't know much of anything about the economics of the ad-supported streaming services.
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