City Girl
Cast & Crew
Alfred Werker
Phyllis Brooks
Ricardo Cortez
Robert Wilcox
Douglas Fowley
Chick Chandler
Film Details
Technical Specs
Synopsis
Ellen Ward, a coffee shop waitress who lives in a squalid flat with her poor, bickering parents and longs for fancy clothes and fun, breaks a date with her fiancé, Donald Sanford, a low-paid lawyer, to go to a Long Island club with underworld figures Mike Harrison and Ritchie, and Mike's date Flo. After a night of dancing, Ritchie and Mike attempt a gas station holdup during which Ellen drops her purse. Questioned by police, she says that she never saw the men before that night and gives false descriptions of them. For her efforts, Ritchie sends her a hundred dollar bill and invites her "steppin'." At the famous Moonglow Room, Charles Blake, who runs every racket in town, is struck by Ellen's attractiveness and naïvete, and he ignores his mistress, Vivian Ross. Soon Blake sends Ritchie to work in his Detroit racket and sets Ellen and Flo up in a fancy apartment. Blake, who wants to marry Ellen, travels to Chicago to get a divorce from his estranged wife, while Ellen breaks her engagement with Don, who has since been appointed assistant attorney general. When Vivian visits Ellen and threatens her with a scissors, Ellen grabs a gun. Backing away, she stumbles over a stool, the gun fires and Vivian is killed. After a jury convicts Ellen of second-degree murder, Blake's men spring her from the court building, and she is put into the trunk of a car headed for Blake's mountain hideout. The car tumbles into a ditch and bursts into flames, and although Ellen is rescued, her face is severely burned. She is secreted away to a sanitarium where plastic surgery is administered. Partly because of public agitation over Ellen's escape, Ralph Chaney, a tough, prominent attorney, is appointed by the governor as a special prosecutor to investigate crime. Don becomes one of Chaney's assistants. After repeated raids by Chaney's men on Blake's establishments, Ellen, whose facial appearance has changed, suggests that with her hair dyed brown, she could infiltrate Chaney's ranks. She becomes Chaney's informant and gives him valuable information about Blake's rivals. After police apprehend Blake's ledger in a raid, Ellen steals it. Realizing her true identity, Don visits her and tries to convince her that she is actually worse off now that she is forced to live alone in a dumpy apartment, than before. Blake interrupts them, and when Don calls him a murderer and tries to impress upon Ellen that the ledger documents Blake's sordid life, Blake shoots at Don, but Ellen blocks him and she is killed. As police arrive to arrest a horrified Blake, who sincerely loved Ellen, Don cradles her body in his arms.
Director
Alfred Werker
Cast
Phyllis Brooks
Ricardo Cortez
Robert Wilcox
Douglas Fowley
Chick Chandler
Esther Muir
Adrienne Ames
George Lynn
Charles Lane
Paul Stanton
Marjorie Main
Norman Willis
Lee Phelps
Richard Terry
Lon Chaney Jr.
Edward Marr
Harry Worth
Pierre Watkin
Charles Trowbridge
Robert Lowery
Heinie Conklin
Gloria Roy
Brooks Benedict
Chick Collins
Delmar Watson
George Guhl
William Newell
Edgar Dearing
Lee Shumway
Ralph Dunn
Emmett Vogan
Wilbur Mack
Eddie Hart
King Mojave
Jack Gargan
Charles Williams
Ben Welden
Stanley Orr
William J. Holmes
Fritzi Brunette
Kam Tong
Milton Kibbee
Jacques Vanaire
Florence Wright
Irving Bacon
George H. Reed
Carroll Nye
Wade Boteler
Edward Emerson
Crew
William H. Anderson
Jasper Blystone
Norman Colbert
Lewis Creber
Bernard Freericks
Robin Harris
Bernard Herzbrun
Frances Hyland
Harry Jackson
Samuel Kaylin
Helen A. Myron
Sol M. Wurtzel
Lester Ziffren
Film Details
Technical Specs
Quotes
Trivia
Notes
End credits were missing from the print viewed. The working title of this film was Blonde Moll. Film Daily notes that in this film "Phyllis Brooks has her biggest role to date." Variety, presumably referring to the role played by Paul Stanton of the special prosecutor, characterizes the film as having "the heroics of a Thomas E. Dewey." This film is not related in any way to the 1930 Fox film of the same name.
