Lady in the Death House (1944)

Poverty row cheapie starring Lionel Atwill as a criminologist who tries to stop an innocent girl from being executed in the electric chair. Told through flashback, the story begins with Atwill befriending Doug Fowley's character, a scientist who's going to do big things someday but until then he has to make ends meet as the executioner at the state pen! He wants to marry Jean Parker but she refuses, having pretty strong opinions on capital punishment on account of her dearly departed dad being a criminal. Things get even more melodramatic when a guy who was blackmailing Jean winds up murdered and she's tried and convicted for the crime. If you guess that Fowley's job as executioner figures back into things, congratulations. On top of all this, Jean's sister is acting shady and doesn't seem all that broken up about Jean being fried extra crispy. Leave it to Lionel Atwill to solve everything, albeit taking his sweet time to do so. It's not a bad little B movie. Very cheap as you would expect from something made by PRC. But it's perfectly watchable and even curiously entertaining at points. Bonus points for excessive "wipes." A sure sign of a top-notch production.

Jean Parker is blackmailed because of a secret from her past. But when the blackmailer ends up dead on the floor, and some people saw this unfold through the window, Parker is arrested and ends up on death row. Shortly before all this happened, she met scientist researcher Douglas Fowley and criminologist Lionel Atwill, and Fowley fell in love with her. He also moonlights as the state executioner however. Atwill doesn't believe Parker is guilty, and thinks Parker's sister Marcia Mae Jones, whom he caught lying on the night of the murder, holds the key to finding the real killer.The movie is told in flashback by Atwill as he recounts the story to some of his colleagues, using a letter Parker wrote shortly before walking to the chair. The actors do a decent job, altho Fowley is surprisingly stiff here.Director Steve Sekely ('Hollow Triumph') and DoP Gus Peterson (ine one of his last movies, his credits go back to 1914!) knew how to quickly and effectively make movies, and it shows. It is told & shot in the typical fashion employed by the low-budget studios, PRC in this case, where pace and economics mattered more than logic (that is: if you have time to think about a plot hole while watching a movie, the movie needs more trimming). It doesn't have a lot of noir visuals, and the movie works better as a mystery, but it's a decent effort that does tick a few boxes.It's not a movie that really demands multiple viewings, but as a quick time-waster, it holds up decently well. 6/10

The short-lived P.R.C. movie production company had a history of making junk in a really short period of time, and other than the classic film noir "Detour", most of their films are quickly forgettable. Like the slightly more well known Monogram, they produced a ton of Z grade westerns, some action films that took clichéd looks at the enemies of World War II, and a smaller amount of horror, dramas and comedies. This is a sort of exploitation drama about a young lady (Jean Parker) who faces the electric chair where her own boyfriend is the one who will pull the switch. Kindly psychiatrist Lionel Atwill rushes to prove her innocence of murder with the help of Parker's younger sister Marcia Mae Jones who truly believed her to be guilty. This is a very tense streamlined drama where nail biting must have replaced popcorn munching. The performances are all very good with Atwill being particularly outstanding. Nice to see him playing a good guy. Also nice to see Jones playing a not so annoying teen for a change! This is one of those times where I give two thumbs up to what was once considered the one movie studio where serious actors did not want to work.

By the extremely humble standard of PRC, this is not a bad movie at all. In fact, if we can accept the somewhat unbelievable manipulations of the plot (e.g. the doomed heroine's boyfriend just happens to the state's official executioner) and the implied but strong criticism of the U.S.A. justice system, it's quite a revelation. Here are just a few of many examples of the script's unstated but strongly implied resumé of slip-shod "justice": Short- sighted Byron Foulger's testimony is, to say the least, highly questionable, but the heroine's totally inept attorney doesn't call him to account at all, and the half asleep judge is so totally incompetent that he too notices nothing unusual in either the testimony itself or the way it is interpreted. Nor presumably does the judge intervene when the jury delivers an obviously half-baked verdict. Worst of all, we are then presented with a careless and totally irresponsible governor – presumably a Republican – who doesn't bother to stay at his desk on the night of the execution, let alone ring the prison or have his secretary stand by at the phone. Instead, he's gadding about at a roadside diner! Fortunately, Lionel Atwill manages to hold the plot together and, despite all, the film does emerge as a second feature winner. Jean Parker makes an attractively convincing heroine, while Douglas Fowley holds down an unusual role as the sympathetic executioner. Available on an excellent Grapevine DVD coupled with the far superior 20th Century Fox "B", Behind Green Lights.