Once a Sinner

Middle-class bank clerk Jack Watling meets hoydenish Pat Kirkwood, and before you know it, they're married. When he meets her family, they're boisterous and none too respectable. The breaking point comes when he discovers she has a child with crook Sydney Tafler. She's never told him and is mildly puzzled when he says she should want to be with the youngster. But the lure of the flesh is too strong, until she leaves him to return to Tafler and her own ways.

It is a very middle-class and class-ridden sort of movie, in which bad people are bad and cannot reform. In Miss Kirkwood's case, it's because she simply doesn't feel the way Watling thinks people should wish to behave. As an American, I find it intensely annoying, not just for Watling's lazy assumptions about how people should behave, but the irredeemibility of the under classes; as the title indicates, there's no way out of being a bad woman.