Forbidden Hollywood Collection, Volume Three (DVD)

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Out of work during the Depression, she gets desperate, and within another few years she's prospering as a gangster's moll, the "property" of hoodlum Leo Darcy (Ricardo Cortez). Still, pre-Code or not, Hollywood needed to tell a story with an uplifting message, a lesson, so it wouldn't be proper just to leave her there doing well. Instead, Mary gets a pang of conscience and decides to go straight. Then she runs into a handsome, wealthy playboy lawyer named Tom Mannering (Franchot Tone), who changes her life. He gives her a job in his office, and they fall in love. But, no, it doesn't end there, either. That wouldn't serve the needs of a Hollywood plot. So to that end, Mary finds she cannot escape her past. She cannot get away from the old gang.

There are no overtly sexual scenes in the movie, no nudity, and no profanity, yet sexual innuendo runs rampant throughout the story. Mary's whole life seems built on her beauty, her charms, and her favors. At least, until she meets Mannering. The story gets pretty sentimental and melodramatic, too, by the time it ends, as Mary finally does the right thing through thick and thin.

Sex, violence, murder, loose morals, and wild parties are the order of the day, which are but a few of the things the later Production Code would crack down on. I mean, how many romances end in unrepentent homicide and divorce? It's one odd, but oddly appealing, little film.

Of further note, "Midnight Mary" is a prime example of Hollywood reflecting the times in which it was made. People smoke in every scene. The jury members are all male. Hoodlums are everywhere, with Prohibition and later the Great Depression encouraging the rise of organized crime. Moreover, the film industry felt it needed not only depict gangsters as realistically as possible but to put them in their place. Men refer to every young woman as "kid" or "doll," and a woman's only hope to make a place for herself in the world was to marry well or become a secretary. In a pinch, maybe a schoolteacher. You get the idea. It was certainly a different age.

Video:
All of the films in the set feature black-and-white, 1.33:1 aspect ratios. Although WB didn't restore them frame-by-frame, the video engineers probably did some touching up because the films look in pretty good shape for their three-quarters-of-a-century age. You'll find a moderate amount of natural grain in some scenes, but nothing of much concern. As for wear and tear, there are minor flecks and occasional lines here and there, hardly noticeable. B&W contrasts are of medium-to-deep strengths, with black levels showing up quite strongly in some shots. And while definition is only so-so, you won't find any blurriness or fade. So, given their vintage, all is well.

Audio:
The monaural audio tracks come up as well as we might expect in Dolby Digital 1.0. Again, the Warner engineers did a good job cleaning up any background noise, hiss and crackles, and provide us with a fairly smooth, if limited, center-channel sound.

Extras:
Each of the six movies includes its own extras. The ones on "Midnight Mary" give you an idea of what they're about. Here, we find an audio commentary by Jerry Vance and Tony Maietta, who are quite informative in a film-course kind of way, although they are pleasantly amiable, too. Next, there's an eight-minute MGM novelty short, "Goofy Movie," a Pete Smith comedy; an MGM cartoon, Bosko's Parlor Pranks," in early color; and a theatrical trailer for "Midnight Mary."

Things conclude on "Midnight Mary" with eighteen scene selections, English as the only spoken language, French subtitles, and English captions for the hearing impaired.

In addition to the three movie discs, a fourth DVD contains the documentaries "Wild Bill: Hollywood Maverick" and "The Men Who Made the Movies: William A. Wellman." The first documentary, made in 1995, is ninety-four minutes long, with twenty-three scenes. Narrated by Alec Baldwin, it includes comments from screen icons Clint Eastwood, James Garner, Robert Mitchum, Gregory Peck, Sidney Portier, and Robert Redford among many others. The second documentary is much like the first; it comes from earlier material, but TCM made the version we get here in 2007. It runs fifty-eight minutes and is divided into fourteen scenes. A cardboard slipcover encases the Digipak container.

Parting Thoughts:
As always, Warner Bros. have come up with an entertaining collection of early, pre-Code movies for their third volume of "Forbidden Hollywood." Any one of them might be worth the purchase price, but considering you get six of them, plus all the extras that go with them, the set seems like a good value any way you look at it.

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