WITHIN THE LAW might be better known for one piece of production trivia than as a film proper. Margaret Leahy, a British beauty contest winner promised a chance at a movie career, was originally supposed to play Norma Talmadge's gum-chewing partner in crime Aggie, only for director Frank Lloyd to discover their prize winner couldn't act her way out of a paper bag. She was foisted onto Talmadge's brother-in-law Buster Keaton, who was making his first feature film THREE AGES. Leahy appeared in that film to wooden but overall harmless effect then dropped out of movies altogether. Working as an interior designer, she came to hate Hollywood and sadly ended her own life over forty years after her first and only movie's debut.
That's a much more interesting story than anything in WITHIN THE LAW, a routine melodrama of the early 1920s with nothing much to recommend it. The bare bones of the plot is promising-- an innocent shopgirl is framed for theft and ends up in jail for three years due to the insistence of her employer, hoping to make an example for any potential wayward employees. Vowing revenge, the shopgirl becomes a con artist when she gets out of prison. Blackmailing wealthy men, she hopes to ensnare her employer's guileless son-- only she falls in love with the dope. What's a girl to do?
Suffer nobly is the answer. And Talmadge certainly knew how to suffer with the best of them, especially in those wonderful Roaring Twenties fashions. Unfortunately, her performance here feels less like an evocation of a living, breathing, thinking character and more like a series of dramatic poses. The central love story is also underdeveloped, making the heroine's turn from vengeance to love hard to swallow or get invested in. As a result, the only one who leaves any impression is Eileen Percy as Aggie, who had me cracking up a lot ("You make love just like the sheik!" she coos to an octogenarian suitor). Otherwise, WITHIN THE LAW is pretty disposable stuff.
That's a much more interesting story than anything in WITHIN THE LAW, a routine melodrama of the early 1920s with nothing much to recommend it. The bare bones of the plot is promising-- an innocent shopgirl is framed for theft and ends up in jail for three years due to the insistence of her employer, hoping to make an example for any potential wayward employees. Vowing revenge, the shopgirl becomes a con artist when she gets out of prison. Blackmailing wealthy men, she hopes to ensnare her employer's guileless son-- only she falls in love with the dope. What's a girl to do?
Suffer nobly is the answer. And Talmadge certainly knew how to suffer with the best of them, especially in those wonderful Roaring Twenties fashions. Unfortunately, her performance here feels less like an evocation of a living, breathing, thinking character and more like a series of dramatic poses. The central love story is also underdeveloped, making the heroine's turn from vengeance to love hard to swallow or get invested in. As a result, the only one who leaves any impression is Eileen Percy as Aggie, who had me cracking up a lot ("You make love just like the sheik!" she coos to an octogenarian suitor). Otherwise, WITHIN THE LAW is pretty disposable stuff.