Precode's Burning Issue: Should Women Wait?

Richard Dix Faces a Day Of Reckoning (1933)

Embezzling Richard Dix gets a two year stretch and leaves comely wife Madge Evans to tender mercy of presumed best friend Conway Tearle. MGM's trailer sold Day Of Reckoning as meditation on how long a woman should wait when deprived of her man, as in Don't Judge Lest You Walk In Those Shoes, this another theme abandoned once Code enforcing got hold. Depression-screen families, even ones servant-supplied, were always just this side of stony broke, roofs of ruin poised to cave in due to misstep or cruel chance. A soft bed of temptation awaited wives; were any safe from seducer snare? Not that real life has spared them since, but movies largely left the topic alone from precode's cessation. Long arm of poetic justice puts Reckoning's usurper in jailhouse clutch of his victim, a neat shortcut to payback when you've but 69 minutes to tie things up, and what's use of a twenty floor drop if not to dispose of villainy? Enjoyable by modest means, and little Spanky McFarland is one of tots stir-bound Dix must leave behind. Day Of Reckoning is available from Warner Archive.