1937 – Claire Trevor
Dead End
This review is going to be a little tricky to write. After all, what is there to say? She only had about four-and-a-half minutes of screen time. She played Francey, the childhood sweetheart of notorious gangster, Baby-Face Martin. He returns to the slum to find her and ask her to get back together with him, now that he is ready to go straight. She refuses because now she’s a prostitute in the terminal stages of syphilis.
Trevor didn’t have much to work with, but I think she did a great job anyway. In less than five minutes, we got her back story, her memories, and her emotions. We got her situation as a down and out woman who hates her life, one in which she feels trapped. She knows she is sick and dying, and she knows she is powerless to do anything to help herself. I really liked the way we are introduced to her when she makes her first appearance. She displays a thick skin, roughened by the hard life of a hooker. And yet despite her callous attitude, she has the integrity to tell her old flame the truth when he asks her to be with him. She turns him down and steps into the light so he can see her illness.
And then, when Baby-Face learns of her disease, he immediately rejects her. Trevor portrayed the shame, the hurt, and the hopeless resignation so believably. And when the gangster gives her money, she isn’t too proud to beg for more. He refuses her again, and still, she isn’t done. Before turning and walking away, she pathetically asks for a kiss on the cheek for old time’s sake. When Baby-Face can barely bring himself to even do that, her disappointment is just heart-wrenching.
Her performance was brief but memorable. I believe she deserved her Oscar nomination, even if she was like a footnote in the narrative, though an important one. Trevor really made me feel for her character, an impressive feat in so little time. And she was gorgeous. So I looked up what else she has been in. Turns out, she was in nearly 70 films over the course of her career that lasted from 1933 to 1987. The ones for which she was the most remembered were Dead End, Stagecoach in 1939, Key Largo in 1948, and The High and the Mighty in 1954.