Just one angel

Another of the movies that's been sitting on my DVR for ages that I wanted to watch before I have to change DVRs again is a late 1930s RKO movie called Tarnished Angel. This is not to be confused with the late-1950s Rock Hudson movie The Tarnished Angels, which has a completely different plot.

Sally Eilers, who had been a star in the first half of the decade, stars here, supported by a very young Ann Miller, who already gets to sing and dance. At the start of the movie, both of them are working at a nightclub that has an illegitimate casino business on the side. Miller plays the entertainment as Vi McMaster, while Eilers plays Carol Vinson, whose job it is to get the right people over to the casino and get them to bet to lose. Now, the casino itself is illegal, but compounding the problem is that in the back office there's also Dandy Dan Bennett (Vinton Hayworth) dealing in stolen jewelry!

Needless to say, the police know there's a casino going on here, and eventually raid the joint, but Carol and Vi are able to escape, together with Vi's boyfriend Eddie (Paul Gilfoyle). Carole at least has a modest amount of money that she got when her playboy boyfriend Paul's (Lee Bowman) father paid her off not to marry Paul.

But that money soon runs out. The detective Sgt. Cramer (Jonathan Hale), who just knows there's more to Carol than meets the eye, is following her and Vi around, seeing to it that Vi is unable to get a job anywhere as a dancer, even though she's probably the most innocent of any of the three. Just as the trio is about to run out of money, they come along a religious revival that's offering free coffee. Seeing it gives Carol an idea. The revivalist asks for donations after the meeting; perhaps Carol could pretend to be a revivalist and make a living that way.

So she tries it, passing herself off as Sister Connie, but it's not too much of a living, since she's trying to support three people and there's also quite a bit of expenses. So she decides to jazz things up by introducing a phony cripple act into the meetings. This gets a lot of money, but also a lot more notoriety, enough that Cramer winds up on the trail again.

So Sister Connie tries a bold tactic. When she sees Cramer out in the audience, she changes the topic of the sermon to her having been a fallen woman in her past life. She also announces that she's going to give the bulk of that night's donations to a charity of the people's choice; they choose the local children's sanatorium for polio victims, run by society matron Mrs. Stockton (Alma Kruger).

Working wth the children gives Carol a different outlook on life, to the point that she wants to give up the revivalist gag. But there are too many people who really do believe in her. That, and the jewel thieves from her old gig at the casino discover that Mrs. Stockton has a $100,000 necklace in a safe in her house, and want Carol to help them in exchanging out that necklace. Can Carol go straight and stay within the strictures of the Production Code?

I mentioned at the beginning that this was an RKO B movie, and I have to admit that in what I've seen on TCM, RKO didn't have the best B movies, as they seemed to have a lower budget than certain MGM and Warner Bros. It also feels to me as though they generally didn't have quite as good a stable of character actors to populate these movies that the other studios did. And yet, Tarnished Angel is one of the better RKO B's that I've seen. It's a surprisingly dark plot, with good performances from all involved. The ending is probably not quite as good as it could have been if the studio didn't have to deal with the Production Code, but at the same time I don't think audiences of the day would have wanted a darker ending.

It's too bad Tarnished Angel doesn't seem to be on DVD, and that it's the sort of movie that doesn't really fit into any thematic box set.