Convict's Code

One more movie that I had on my DVR is coming up again soon: Convict's Code. This is another of those movies that TCM ran during their spotlight of B movies some months back, and now it's on the TCM schedule again, tomorrow (Nov. 21) at 10:00 AM. So as always, I made a point of watching it to be able to do a post on it here in conjunction with the upcoming airing.

Robert Kent plays Dave Tyler, a former college football star who apparently was unable to parlay that success into a business career in the days when pro football was frowned upon. Instead, he fell in with the sort of people who would frame you as having driven the getaway car for a bank robbery, and bribing half a dozen witnesses to testify to that, even tough Tyler claims he was nowhere near the bank. But he got sent to prison for a long stretch.

Eventually he gets paroled, but there are all sorts of conditions on the parole: he has a nightly curfew; he can only get married if his parole officer Bennett (Victor Kilian) approves; he's not allowed to drink; he has to carry his parole card at all times; and so on and so on. Who's going to want to employ somebody like that, Tyler wonders.

But he is able to get a job, with a guy named Mr. Warren (Sidney Blackmer), who says he remembers Dave from his college football days and wants to give Dave a second chance. Warren is apparently some sort of moderately successful businessman, enough to be able to afford a chauffeur, so he gives that job to Dave, even though Dave has never been a chauffeur before. What Dave doesn't know is that Warren is really the mastermind behind the bank job for which Dave was sent to prison, and that he's hired Dave to keep him close by and stop Dave if he asks questions to try to clear his name.

Dave's first assignment as a chauffeur is to pick up Warren's sister Juile (Anne Nagel). They meet, and it's love at first sight. This is a big problem for Dave, since he's a parolee, and can't go too far in the relationship without Bennett's approval. And Dave doesn't want to admit the truth to Julie, in part because she might reject him, and in part because he doesn't want to hurt her by saddling her with a parolee.

Meanwhile, Dave does start trying to find the six witnessess who testified against him at the trial, only to find out that they're either dead or have fled the country. Warren is good at getting rid of people, not that Dave knows this. Eventually, he is able to find one man who claims to be able to help Dave, but the quid pro quo is that Dave is going to have to do a lot of things that violate his probation to get that help....

There's a reason Convict's Code is nothing more than a throwaway B movie. It's not exactly bad, but pretty much every second of the brief running time belies its provenance as a cheap B movie from Poverty Row. Blackmer is probably the best of the lot here, together with Maude Eburne, who plays the landlady of the rooming house where Tyler gets a room. Hers is the sort of woman who doesn't see anything because she doesn't want to see anything. As long as she gets her rent on time, what else goes on isn't her business.

Convict's Code is definitely worth one watch, and I believe it even fell into the public domain to be able to get a DVD release at some point. (The print TCM ran was a British release print with a distributing company I'd never heard of.)