Virtue

Re-discovery of Columbia's popular pre-Code films, an exclusive feature of the Festival's 'Treasures from the Archives', continues with this newly-minted double bill. These tough, early talkies helped to make stars of a number of young Hollywood actresses whose characters' moral dilemmas they generally portray, topnotch among them the two on show here: Carole Lombard and Barbara Stanwyck. Despite their economy and relative brevity, they are also high-quality productions, superbly photographed in atmospheric black-and-white by Joseph Walker, and both with Capra-esque scripts by Robert Riskin.

Virtue is a typical melodrama of the period, imbued with the urban temptations of music, sex, drugs and money that pervade the American culture and cinema of the early Depression era. Lombard plays a prostitute who tries to reform and redeem herself after meeting and marrying innocent good-guy taxi-driver Pat O'Brien, but finds going straight isn't that simple. The film pulls no ethical punches, but even the lax censorship of the time had its sticking-points, and Virtue opens with a sound-only section (the cut picture is lost) in which a judge convicts Lombard of prostitution and banishes her from New York City.
Clyde Jeavons

Shopworn

Where the soft-centred Lombard moved on to classic screwball comedy, Barbara Stanwyck was the Pre-Code Queen and made a career out of seductive, spiderish femmes fatales. Shopworn is a characteristic, if not entirely convincing, example of her persona-in-progress, in which she plays a waitress who falls for a rich student (Regis Toomey).

His mother - with the connivance of a friendly judge - promptly gets her imprisoned on a charge of lewdness. She bounces back (probably in more ways than one) to become a successful musical stage star, and goes head-to-head once again with her suitor's ferocious mama. It's hard-edged, pacey and a classic of morality and economics.
Clyde Jeavons