Gotta love how the Code treated women

I always enjoy the Warner Bros. B movies, so when one that I haven't done a post on before shows up on TCM, I try to make certain to record it so I can watch it. One such movie that I only recently got around to watching despite it having been on my DVR for some time is The Law in Her Hands.

The main "her" in the title of the movie is Mary Wentworth, played by Margaret Lindsay. As the movie opens, she and her friend Dot Davis (Glenda Farrell) are getting sworn into the New York State bar, having passed the bar exam. They had been working at a restaurant to pay their way through law school, and plan to start their own law firm together. After the bar ceremony, they go back to their old restaurant to celebrate. A man shows up there, obviously from a protection racket, and trying to induce the boss to join the "benevolent association" voluntarily. When that doesn't work, the guy sets off a smoke bomb.

Frank Gordon (Lyle Talbot) runs the protection rackets in New York, and he's none too pleased about the violence his underling used. Now he's going to have to get the witnesses to find a reason not to show up at the trial. He's almost successful enough that ADA Robert Mitchell (Warren Hull) is unable to prosecute, at least until Mary, who also happens to be Mitchell's girlfriend, shows up with a photograph taken with the defendant in the background, convicting the defendant.

Mary and Dot's law practice isn't particularly successful, although a process server who is only in the movie for comic relief tries to help them. Mitchell tells Mary that perhaps she should give up practicing law and just marry him and start a family together, as all good women were supposed to do back in the 1930s. Gordon, for his part, has a different way of dealing with Mary, which is to try to get her on a very highly-paid retainer.

Of course, working for the man behind the protection rackets is bound to cause problems, and that eventually becomes the case. Mary is successful enough, but the way she gets acquittals challenges judicial ethics, jokes about the idea that lawyers actually care about ethics aside. The breaking point comes when Mary learns that in trying to spoil the milk of people who didn't want to join the dairy protection racket, Gordon's men actually poisoned it. Mary doesn't want to defend Gordon, but how can she get him convicted without violating attorney-client privilege?

The Law in Her Hands is entertaining enough for a B movie, which is to say that it does entertain although it won't be well-remembered after watching and doesn't bear much resemblance to reality. But then there's a coda at the end which I have a feeling would have dissatisfied a lot of women even in the 1930s. Glenda Farrell doesn't get as much to do as I would have liked, and Eddie Acuff as the comic relief isn't the most relieving person. But then again, The Law in Her Hands, being a B movie, is the sort of thing that the studio probably had no expectation that people 90 years in the future would be watching.