Ciannelli's business is a "clip joint" where men looking for a costly good time can drink, gamble, and have their pick of the girls. Presumably, prostitution takes place in the upstairs bedrooms, though the Production Code keeps the inference fuzzy. The woman hustling drink orders are Betty Davis, Lola Lane, Isabel Jewell, Mayo Methot, and Rosalind Marquis. Davis is paying the out-of-town college tuition of her pretty younger sister Jane Bryan.
Damian O'Flynn racks up a huge bill at one of Ciannelli's clip joints. He can't pay, and is murdered. Bette Davis is arrested as his date and the last person confirmed to see him alive. Davis testifies against two of Ciannelli's heavies, but her testimony is perjured, and the defendants are declared not guilty.
The scandal makes Bryan ashamed to return to college, and she decides to work for the villainous Ciannelli. Further crimes oblige Davis and the other "hostesses" to testify against Ciannelli, despite his threats to kill them if they talk.
How others will see it. Marked Woman was overlooked by the Academy Awards, and was not among the top money-makers for the year. But time has been kind to it, and it has more than 3K user votes at imdb.com, a fairly high total for a 1937 movie. For example, the Deanna Durbin vehicle One Hundred Mean and a Girl, a box office smash during 1937, only has 856 user votes today.
Marked Woman has a solid user rating of 7.2 out of 10, which rises to 7.7 among women over 45, who presumably admire Davis' courage and determination in taking down Ciannelli. The user reviews affirm Warner Bros. reputation during the 1930s as a studio churning out solid gangster films, and frequently repeat the best-known legendary story from the production, that Bette Davis replaced the studio's demure face bandages with more devastating ones following her cinematic beating.
How I felt about it. Most viewers think the film's biggest plot hole is O'Flynn asking for Davis' address when he is dropping her off at her front door. But it's not. O'Flynn is drunk and foolish. The biggest plot hole is instead that Bogart would have the rap sheet of the first two men on trial for murder, and would have realized they were in jail on a petty charge on the night O'Flynn was killed.
Bogart regularly played sinister gangsters at this stage in his career (Dead End, The Petrified Forest, The Roaring Twenties), and he must have enjoyed the change of pace of playing the film's hero. But instead of escaping his stereotype (which wouldn't happen until Casablanca) he met his third wife, Mayo Methot, whom he left seven years later for his fourth wife, Lauren Bacall.
Bogart's peculiar vocal style identifies him immediately to the veteran classic film viewer, but he seems miscast here, too energetic and gullible to suit his onscreen persona. Ciannelli is appropriately evil as the gangster kingpin, and Bette Davis once again rises to the occasion of her flawed but redeemable character.
Still, it seems unlikely that all six "hostesses" at the Club Intime share the same apartment. Bryan's transition from goody-goody to aspiring hostess lacks credibility, and Davis' early-scene outspoken remarks to Ciannelli are humored far too much by the malevolent mug.