Girls in Chains

Girls in Chains (1943) 1/2 (out of 4) Incredibly bad drama from PRC has a school teacher (Arline Judge) being fired from her job because her sister is dating a gangster. The teacher then gets a job in a home for delinquent girls where she tries to clean up the abuse, which might lead back to the gangster.

**SPOILERS**** Gangster Johnny Moon,Allan Byron, is seen in the beginning of the movie getting away with murder when he's found innocent by a jury despite all the evidence against him. It turns out that his sister in law Helen Martin played the very married,eight times, Arline Judge who lost her job as a teacher because of her connection to Johnny who later ends up putting an end to his criminal career.

Back in the 1930s and 40s, there were quite a few so-called 'poverty row studios'. These were small outfits with very small budgets...

I agree with most of the criticisms of the first 11 reviewers and agree that Edgar G. Ulmer has not worked his magic and made a shoestring budget into a masterpiece.

The version shown on "Film Detectives" channel has turrible sound, picture, and editing, but it's probably taken from a copy out of copyright. The ONLY name i recognize in here is Sid Melton, who, for those old enough, remember him as the bumbling contractor Alf Monroe on Green Acres!

Thanks to TCM, I am acquainting myself with this little gem. I was actually stopped in my tracks while channel-hopping by the sight of what I thought was Olivia de Havilland having a very bad hair day.

This monstrosity should settle for once and for all that Edgar Ulmer is not the continental wunderkind that Peter Bogdanavich held him to be, (a view, incidentally, that Ulmer did all he could to promote.) True, in "Strange Illusion,"and "Detour," Ulmer delivered films with suspense and pacing, whilst in "Bluebeard," he delivered a fairly convincing 19th century atmosphere, (heavily influenced by German expressionism but under-cut by the film's supporting actresses who sound like Bronx stenographers rather than Parisian coquettes.

Plot-- an idealistic mental health worker is conscripted into making changes in a girls reformatory run by a crooked combine. There the girls are being treated like nothing more than numbers.

This is a very low budget film about women who were put behind bars in a young woman's correction facility which is controlled by a mobster named Johnny Moon, (Addison Randall). Johnney Moon controls the city government and has given his right hand hood the position as warden of this correction facility.