Road To Paradise (1930)

Road To Paradise is a 1930 First National pre-code movie.

Loretta Young plays dual roles. She plays Mary Brennan, an orphan girl who has been raised by two good-natured crooks, Nick and Jerry (known as Jerry the Gent). Mary is a nice girl but she’s not entirely honest herself. It doesn’t take much effort to persuade her to join the crooks in a daring criminal enterprise.

Mary also has an unusual paranormal ability which will later become very important.

Young also plays wealthy socialite Margaret Waring. She’s very wealthy indeed.

Mary and her two crooked pals notice Margaret in a speakeasy. They are amazed by the resemblance. The two women look identical.

This gives the two crooks an idea. Having Mary impersonate Margaret could make it much easier to burgle Margaret’s house. One of the things they noticed about Margaret in the speakeasy was that she was wearing some very expensive jewels.

The burglary takes on a slightly farcical quality with a cheerful Irish cop spotting the two crooks on the roof and pursuing them with a notable lack of success. Various cops spend most of the movie in pursuit of these burglars

The burglary also leads to unintended consequences.

Everything hinges on the question of identity. There’s just no way to tell the two women apart.

One of the things that happened after the Production Code took effect in 1934 is that genre boundaries became more rigid. In the pre-code it was not uncommon to come across melodramas with some of the lighthearted character of comedies, and movies that were more or less comedies but with strong melodrama overtones. The tone of pre-code movies was often fluid.

In the pre-code era there weren’t too many rules. If for example you wanted to take a movie such as this one and add an element of the paranormal then you simply went ahead and did so. Road To Paradise is a typical pre-code oddity which simply ignores genre boundaries.

Loretta Young was aways a delight in her pre-code movies. This movie is no exception. She’s utterly adorable as the criminally inclined Mary. She handles the dual role quite successfully. The focus is more on Mary than on Margaret. Mary is very likeable - she’s a crook but she’d prefer not to be.

The best line in the movie is when one of the crooks who raised her comments, "I could never understand this desire for respectability. It always seemed kind of morbid to me.”

The other players are all perfectly adequate but this film completely belongs to Loretta Young.

This movie was directed by William Beaudine, later to become known as One-Shot Beaudine for his practice of never shooting retakes. In his later career, spent mostly making B-movies, that was understandable. His success was based on being able to bring low-budget movies in on time and on budget every single time. That doesn’t make him a bad director and in Road To Paradise he displays considerable skill.

What makes it recognisably a pre-code film is its indifference to the law. Being a criminal is OK as long as you’re basically a nice person. And if you’re a young sweet pretty female then it’s definitely OK.

Road To Paradise is cheerful and good-natured. Loretta Young is more than enough reason to give it a spin. Recommended.

This movie is included on a two-movie Warner Archive DVD paired with another Loretta Young pre-code film, Week-End Marriage.