Plot
A young girl, Rita Adams, asks her former gangster father why people call him a snitch. He is then gunned down in front of her. She is sent to an orphanage, where her best friends are Mickey Roma and Bob Elliott. Rita grows up be a struggling single girl who lives with best friend, singer Donna, and who has with a drunken boyfriend, Harold De Witt, the son of a rich, powerful man, Clarence. Rita loses her job in a factory when she cannot get bonded. Bob, who is now an aerospace engineer, offers to try to get her work. When Harold drives Rita home on night, he kills a pedestrian in a hit and run while Rita is in the car. Acting on the advice of his father's lawyer, Bruce King, he gets Rita to claim responsibility for the accident, saying that he will be disinherited otherwise and that she will only get probation. She gets sentenced to one to five years in prison. Rita gets out of prison and her friend from the orphanage, Mickey, who now works in organised crime, explains how Harold betrayed her. Rita takes to crime, robbing gullible men. Clarence De Witt wants the police to crack down on organised crime and leads a reform ticket. Jimmy Kelly is a policeman undercover in the gang as Bill Dugan. Kelly/Dugan collects protection money for racketeer Kurt Parrish, who complains that receipts are down because of DeWitt's reform efforts. Mickey, meanwhile, asks Rita to return the letters in Harold's file which prove his guilt, but she has her own plan for revenge and buys radio time to speak out against DeWitt's hypocrisy. This wins her a meeting with Parrish and mobster Lou Wood, and after Rita negotiates a place for herself in the syndicate, she then visits DeWitt with photocopies of the letters. Spurning DeWitt's offer of money, Rita forces him to use his political influence for the syndicate's benefit, prompting Jimmy to observe that Parrish is using votes, or "paper bullets", to take control. When Mickey learns that the real Dugan is in prison, Jimmy is abducted by Parrish's men, and the ensuing pursuit by the police ends in an accident. Joe persuades the newspapers to print the false information that Jimmy was killed in the crash, which devastates Donna, who has fallen in love with him. Rita then quits the syndicate to marry Bob, but immediately after the wedding she is arrested and indicted along with Parrish, Wood and DeWitt. During the trial, the courtroom spectators are shocked when Jimmy takes the stand, and all four defendants are convicted. As Bob comforts Rita and promises to wait for her, children play at the playground she built as a monument to the innocence of youth.Cast
*Production
The Kozinsky Brothers were businessmen who wanted to get into slot machines. They needed films for the machines and had a bad experience sourcing films from Cecil B. De Mille which prompted them to get into film production. They had a story written by Martin Mooney about two orphans who grow up into a life of crime. They formed KB Productions and made a verbal deal with Producers Releasing Corporation where they got $19,500 and 50% of the profits. The film was shot at Talisman Studios. It had its production budget doubled. The Kozinsky Brothers knewSoundtrack
* "I Know, I Know" (by Vic Knight, Johnny Lange andReception
The movie was highly regarded and was the first film distributed by the Producers Releasing Corporation into the Loew's Circuit. It launched their careers as film producers.References
External links
* * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Paper Bullets 1941 films American black-and-white films 1940s crime thriller films Producers Releasing Corporation films American crime thriller films Films directed by Phil Rosen 1940s English-language films 1940s American films