Well, not Thelma Ritter

One of the movies I recently watched off my DVR had 20 minutes between the end of the movie and the allotted time slot, so there was enought time for TCM to insert a two-reeler. That short was one of the Crime Does Not Pay shorts, A Thrill for Thelma.

After the credits, and a montage of crime-related things like gunshots and sirens, we hand it over to Your MGM Reporter (played here by William Tannen; I'll have to look it up to see if MGM had different people playing the reporter). He's at the local Women's Prison, where the warden (an actress, not a real warden) and a police captain (again, an actor, not a real captain) want to inform everybody that Crime Does Not Pay. To let our viewers know this, they call in one of the women marching in formation: Thelma Black (Irene Hervey).

Flash back to two years earlier. Thelma is just graduating from school and talking to her classmates. Some of them are looking for men so they can settle down and start a family, but not Thelma. She wants excitement out of life while she's still young enough to enjoy it all. With that in mind, she goes to beauty school and even gets a job at a hoity-toity salon, where she eventually meets Steve (Robert Livingston).

One night, Steve and Thelma are out driving, when they pass a parked car that seems to be doing the Lover's Lane thing. Steve comments that perhaps they should stop and give such couples a fright, just to see their reaction. After all, these couples don't want to be found out by the general public. They even do it once, but in the aftermath, Thelma is horrified to think that Steve took the man's wallet. She thinks they should return the wallet forthwith, but Steve is having no part of that. When Thelma tries to turn around, Steve tries to take the wheel, and that results in a car crash. Not that it hurt Thelma or Steve; the incident forced another car off the road and that car crashed into a tree, killing the driver.

So now Thelma is a fugitive. She thinks about going to the police, but Steve reminds her that she was driving, and being the driver in a hit-and-run that resulted in someone in the other car dying is serious business. So now Thelma is in with Steve, straight down the line as Edward G. Robinson might have said in Double Indemnity.

A Thrill for Thelma isn't a bad little short, although this one is only number 4 in the Crime Does Not Pay series and it really hadn't hit its stride yet. As always, the shorts in this series are laden with MGM moralizing, but they're still fun for the most part. It's been about a dozen years the the Warner Archive put all of the shorts out in a box set, so you should be able to find it somewhere.