He flew with World War I's Lafayette Escadrille. Later made his Hollywood introduction by landing a plane on Douglas Fairbank's property. And went on to a remarkable 40 year career that includes these six snappy, pre-Code works. Disc 1 of this William A. Wellman movie collection features burly railroad men vying for Mary Astor in Other Men's Women and Barbara Stanwyck proving she's a mail-order bride worth The Purchase Price. Stepping out of the shadows for Disc 2 are Ruth Chatterton as brothel madam Frisco Jenny and Loretta Young as a desperate moll in the dazzlingly stylistic Midnight Mary. Wellman flexes depression-era social-conscience muscle in Disc 3, using Heroes For Sale to focus on the plight of war veterans and championing the wondering youths turned into Wild Boys Of The Road. Go where the excitement is with Hollywood's Wild Bill.

DVD Savant:
1932's Frisco Jenny comes from the same mold as the better-known "sacrificing mother" tales Madame X and Stella Dallas, with the difference that this mother's sacrifice is much greater. It's a solid acting opportunity for the nearly forgotten Ruth Chatterton (Female) and has a good role for Louis Calhern as an earlier version of his venal lawyer in The Asphalt Jungle.

Jenny Sandoval (Chatterton) works the cashier's box in her father's bar on the Barbary Coast; he forbids her to marry piano player Dan McAllister (James Murray, the hero of King Vidor's The Crowd). When Jenny tells her dad that she's pregnant, she receives a slap -- which is immediately followed by the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906. Left penniless and alone, Jenny must raise her baby while begging for coins with The Salvation Army. To avoid starvation, Jenny is soon running a string of "party girl" prostitutes. A dice game leads to the shooting death of a cheater (J. Carrol Naish, uncredited); Jenny helps cover for mob mouthpiece Steve Dutton (Calhern), and forms a lifelong partnership. "Frisco Jenny" becomes a serious procurer of women, an arrangement that pays the bills but ruins her chances at motherhood. Her baby, Daniel, is put in the foster care of Judge Reynolds (Berton Churchill, looking at this age much like Philip Seymour Hoffman). When she can afford to take Dan back, Jenny can't bear to tear him from the side of his new foster mother. She instead drops out of her son's life and keeps a scrapbook of his progress from afar.

Twenty years later Jenny is the ringleader of a group of brothel madams. The grown Dan Reynolds is now the new District Attorney, thanks to Jenny's sabotaging of the opposition candidate, a shill for the mob. But when Dan's policies put legal heat on Steve Dutton, the crooked lawyer threatens to spill the beans about Dan's true parentage.

Frisco Jenny puts some meat on the "sacrificing mother" skeleton. Jenny isn't the innocent victim of a single indiscretion. She gets a raw deal in life but chooses a crooked path for herself, and doesn't expect forgiveness. The ignominy that Jenny chooses for herself isn't arranged to create a soppy three-handkerchief ending. The maternal doom that settles in at the finale has much more integrity than the later "moral pretzel" films cleared by the censors.

Wellman's direction is extremely efficient. The salty ambiance of the Barbary Coast is established immediately when we see how the bar girls ply their trade. A successful chiseler gets men drunk and promises to meet them later. When the bar girl goes home, she must step over the drunks now littering the sidewalk, recovering the keys she gave them earlier in the evening.

A weak link in the film is the use of an Anglo woman (Helen Jerome Eddy) in makeup to portray Ahmah, Jenny's faithful Chinese servant. The woman is always present, even when logic says she shouldn't be. Ruth Chatterton takes not a single false step as Jenny, and Louis Calhern is a loyal criminal cohort until he's threatened. William Wellman is said to play a bit as a reporter.

Frisco Jenny can boast a killer earthquake sequence several years before MGM's San Francisco. One violent shot where the floor of the bar drops suddenly will surely take you by surprise.