Girls Under 21

When Frances White marries the rich gangster Smiley Ryan, the other young girls from the slum look up to her and envy her for her smart clothes and new apartment. A prison sentence changes Frances. She wants to start living an honest life and finds work as a sales assistant. By comparison, her younger sister and her girl gang fall ever deeper into criminality. A big store robbery ends in catastrophe. 
Poverty, prejudice and crime, but also the path to a bourgeois existence are the themes of this B-film, directed by Max Nosseck (1902–1972), originally from Pomerania. In 1931, he landed a surprise success in Berlin with his directorial debut Der Schlemihl before he was forced to flee from the Nazis to France, Portugal, Spain, Holland and eventually the US. There he shot a film in Yiddish (Der Vilner Balebesl, 1940) and showed that he could also deliver quality on a small budget.