Leila Bennett

A hardened New York City cab driver, Matt Nolan, struggles as a crooked syndicate attempts to eliminate all independent cabbies in the city. With Matt's livelihood threatened, he recruits a gang to stand up to them - violently.

Middle-aged housekeeper Emma (Marie Dressler) helps a lonely widower, Ronald Smith (Richard Cromwell) raising his spoiled and over-entitled children. When Smith takes Emma on a vacation, he makes his feelings for her known by proposing marriage. Emma happily accepts, but tragedy strikes when Smith dies of a heart attack shortly after. Emma is devastated, but then must face Smith's children, who suspect she may have been involved in the death of their father.

This offbeat melodrama was directed by the iconoclastic William A. Wellman and stars Barbara Stanwyck as Joan Gordon, a hardboiled nightclub singer on the lam who becomes a farmer's mail-order bride. After Joan gets fed up being the kept woman of her married boss, bootlegger Ed Fields (Lyle Talbot), she flees New York City and ends up in North Dakota as the mail-order bride of wheat farmer Jim Gilson (George Brent). The film features one of the weirdest wedding ceremonies ever shot, and Stanwyck's rendition of "Take Me Away" marks the first time she sang on screen.