The climax of the film is hilarious and, considering its utter lack of redemption, oddly touching. Even Ruby, who clearly still loves Bill despite his faded attraction to her, cannot abide such a transgression, and her organization of the criminal elements against him seems more a response to this breaking of the rules than any emotional attachment to her own flesh and blood. When the bail bounces, people assume Bill shortchanged Drury, and the one thing that cannot be forgiven in this sleazy world is a double-cross. Bill, for Ruby's sake, gives him the bail money, but Elaine, smitten with this dangerous criminal, swaps out Bill's cash for worthless bonds and absconds with the robber, who thinks himself Scot-free. That unspoken agreement between the law and the street trash forms the basis for the climax: Drury, Ruby's deadbeat jailbird brother, robs a bank as soon has he gets out of prison, a move that threatens a life sentence. The cops do chase the criminals, but they also seem to accept the idea of crime after all, without it, they'd have no job. Naturally, Brown also erases the thin blue line separating cop from criminal: Bill spends his nights carousing around the underworld, but he can also rub elbows with legitimate businessmen, even the D.A. As has been said, gender and sexual distinctions muddy with the cross-dressing and sexual ambiguity. He prefers instead to show the blurred lines that separate out the various touchstones of civilized society. Despite her talent, Anderson only ever got cast as the gruesome hag in film because of her looks, and Brown's nonjudgmental view of his characters is perhaps best exemplified by his casting of her as a sex symbol and the only character in the film with anything approaching true beauty.īut that's not to say Brown condemns anyone else. She shoplifts for the fun of it, suggests a bisexuality primarily based on a need to screw whomever's nearest, and a sadomasochism she pins down to a need for someone to "give me a good thrashing." Judith Anderson, one of the great stage actresses of the era, makes her film debut as Ruby, a speakeasy madam and Bill's only true friend in the world. Frances Dee, who would later be known for more wholesome roles and her early retirement to raise a family, here plays a bored rich girl slumming around the underworld to tend to her dark fetishes.
Some of the film's transgressiveness isn't even intentional but the result of retrospective career evaluations. Even stranger, Bill wheezes with uncontrollable laughter, one of several indications that he too might fall somewhere in-between sexual roles. When Bill offers her a cigar, she drawls, "You big cissy" like a disappointed father. Bill's movements through speakeasies and racetracks offer some baffling sights: a woman in drag (complete with monocle) stands like a butler at a party. Innuendo infuses nearly every line, and Brown's blunt visual style keeps matters so off-keel that the occasional moments of stiffness never slow down the nightmare. Without it, how would you know you were in the city?īrown's film has some of the awkward pacing of the early talkies, but his brutal wit manages to box back any snags in the narrative. There's no moral to offset the madness of the film's crime-ridden social pits if anything, Brown considers crime a completely viable form of business in the Depression. The Depression-era underworld Brown drifts through is a topsy-turvy fever dream of transvestism, bootlegging and sadomasochism. Bill talks a big game and hands out Cuban cigars by the handful, but his arrogance is tempered by the quiet knowledge that the criminals he considers friends and allies will desert him at the earliest sign of trouble. The story of cop-turned-amoral bondsman Bill Bailey (George Bancroft), Blood Money is an unsentimental, occasionally repellent dive into the criminal underworld by way of one of its transitory members. Rowland Brown's snarling Pre-Code feature Blood Money was thought lost for decades, perhaps out of wishful thinking for decency's sake.
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