The 77 th edition was no different. What stood out, however, in the forty-odd titles of the selection curated by Ehsan Khoshbakht, was a distinctive streak of social awareness and progressiveness, which the studio started to promote as early as the s in films which are today unfortunately all but forgotten. This is the case with Under Age , an Edward Dmytryk film, which promotes awareness for vagrancy and sensitivity to gender equality.
Taking his cue from G Men , an iconic Warner Bros. This makes the script written by Robert Hardy Andrews whose story Ernst Lubitsch earlier made into If I Had a Million as feminist as anything that came out in the s, or, really, at any other time in the history of cinema.
The film follows two sisters in their early twenties who were just released from jail after serving time for vagrancy. Burke, the forty-something ring leader of a shady business specializing in using women to clean rich customers of their savings. Burke is made to appear more patriarchal than the men she steals from. Although educational, the film shows sympathy for the plight of unemployed young women in the depression-ridden thirties, and touches upon a subject that would remain taboo in Hollywood to this day: the dangers of the flesh trade and women trafficking.
For that reason, and for the fact that the script is based on real fact, this Columbia picture shows a progressive side for the early s. This is important because film noirs like Detour , which would catapult Tom Neal to fame four years later, showed women as femme fatales or vamps who preyed on men innocent enough to fall for their charms.
The Glass Wall directed by Maxwell Shane, which won the Locarno Leopard in , raises awareness about the injustices of immigration law. Peter Kuban played by a young Vittorio Gassman , is an escapee from the concentration camps and stowaway on a ship bound for the US. He escapes the authorities and, because misery loves company, befriends a female employee the unforgettable Gloria Graham who is equally maltreated by an unjust system.
