I Promise to Pay

I've been mentioning over the past few months how I recorded quite a few movies during TCM's spotlight on B movies, in no small part because they have interesting plot synopses. Next up from that spotlight is a late 1930s movie from Columbia, I Promise to Pay.

The movie opens with a B-movie shenanigan, that of a montage of newspaper headlines to set the stage and make it look like more is happening than really is. In this case, it's news of a heat wave gripping the city. This is really just a ruse to introduce us to Eddie Lang (Chester Morris), an office worker with a wife Mary (Helen Mack) and two young kids. They're living on Eddie's salary in a small apartment that doesn't really cool down, these being the days before widespread residential air conditioning.

Eddie, having a bit of trouble concentrating on his job, comes across a classified ad in the newspaper from somebody offering a vacation out in the country. And he's got a week's vacation coming up. The only problem is that he needs the money. He's got an annual bonus coming up after the vacation, so he hopes that he could perhaps borrow against that bonus. Sadly, the boss says the company has a flat policy against that, and to be fair to them, setting that sort of precednet is a terrible idea.

Eddie has a "friend" named Al, however, who tells Eddie of a business he just happens to know that lends small amounts of money to lots of people just like Eddie. It sounds too good to be true, and of course it is. Al is a tout for Richard Farra (Leo Carrillo), who runs the local loan shart racket. And the rates Farra's organization charges are outrageous: $10 a week on the $50 loan that Eddie wants to borrow, which he gets from a cigar stand, something that should be a warning sign with red lights and sirens. And Eddie is actually smart enough to realize that the chit he signs doesn't say anything about interest. But he figures he'll be paying the loan back in full in two weeks when he gets his bonus.

But a couple of things happen. First is the interest that I mentioned, which they fill in afterward to make it look like the people who take out these loans know full well what they're getting into. And then Eddie finds out that his company isn't in good enough shape this year to pay out the annual bonus, so now Eddie is going to have to come up with some other way to pay off the loan, which is going to be tough since just getting that $10 a week is hard enough, never mind the principle.

And he doesn't know about Al's being in Farra's employ, so when he tells Al his plans, Al goes off and blabs to Farra, since that's Al's job. And when Eddie decides he's simply not going to pay and go to the police, well, Farra knows that he can call on force to get people to pay up. Eddie, getting deeper into debt, gets himself into trouble that costs him his job, although this at least this has the "benefit" of forcing him to move to where he thinks Falla's men can't find him....

I Promise to Pay was made in the late 1930s, which is partly while the Depression was still going on, and partly after Joe Breen started enforcing the Production Code. So we know that the story is going to have a happy-ish ending with the bad guys getting what's coming to them. That, and it's going to give us a bit of a moral message about the evils of the loan racket. So watching a movie like this almost 90 years on, it's decidedly dated. But audiences of the day probably wouldn't have found it so, and would have identified with people having such terrible financial troubles. In that regard, I Promise to Pay does work as a B movie. It's no great shakes, and certainly not the sort of material that would get produced today, but even in the 1930s B movies weren't seen as anything more than for current consumption.