You can learn all kinds of strange things from movies.  For example, there’s the curious title of 1937’s The Ticket of Leave Man.  I was wondering what that phrase meant, and it turns out it as an old British expression that is roughly analogous to parole.  I wonder if that phrase is still widely in use today.

John Warwick is on such an early release from prison after being imprisoned under a false accusation of passing forged pound notes.  The true criminals are Tod Slaughter, who is also the most dangerous killer in London at the time, and Frank Cochran, as a counterfeiter and an unfortunate stereotype of the miserly Jew. 

Slaughter framed Warwick because he longs for the other man’s fiancée (Margorie Taylor) and conspires the get the man out of the picture.  But then Warwick is released earlier as a ticket of leave man (and, yes, I am going to run that phrase into the ground).  He reconnects with Taylor but she has to present him as her brother, out of fear she will be evicted if it is discovered she is associated with a convict.  As if that isn’t bad enough, Warwick will have difficulty finding employment, as we already say in an earlier scene where a waiter on parole was fired from a restaurant when that is revealed.  I’m just glad most businesses don’t have any qualms with hiring felons nowadays.  *cough*

Using the same alias Taylor suddenly invented for him when introducing him to her neighbors, he gets employed at Peter Gawthorne’s bank.  All Slaughter has to do to put Warwick out of the picture again is to reveal the felon’s true name and history to Gawthorne, which he does.  But ruining Warwick isn’t enough for Slaughter, as he wants to also corrupt him, telling each successive employer they have a ticket of leave man in their employ, until our hero has no recourse but to turn to crime.

This is a good movie, and in a similar vein as the preceding Slaughter films.  The top-billed star continues to chew the scenery with vigor, and your enjoyment of that will depend upon your tolerance for that kind of thing (also being a fan of Vincent Price, my tolerance is quite high).  The other cast members (many of which appeared in Slaughter’s other films) all turn in solid, if unremarkable, performances.

The most interesting aspect of The Ticket of Leave Man is a fake charity Slaughter sets up to supposedly find employment for parolees.  This led me to theorize that, if religion is the last refuge of a scoundrel, and politics the first, bogus charities occupy the space between the two. 

Dir: George King

Starring Tod Slaughter, John Warwick, Marjorie Taylor

Watched as part of the Powerhouse/Indicator blu-ray box set The Criminal Acts of Tod Slaughter: Eight Blood-and-Thunder Entertainments, 1935-1940