Bayard Veiller’s play opened the Eltinge Theatre, New York, on 11 September 1912. It ran for 541 performances over two seasons, and made the reputations of its author and Jane Cowl, its star. Eight companies toured the U.S. with it, and it then became a stock-company favorite; it was still being performed when the Talmadge film was released, and is reputed to have made the Selwyns and A.H. Woods, who owned the rights, more than a million dollars. It can be seen as part of a cycle of plays with sympathetic portrayals of professional criminals, which came to be known as “crook melodramas.” Other examples from the same period are The Regeneration, by Owen Kildare and Walter Hackett (1908), and Alias Jimmy Valentine, by Paul Armstrong (1909), both of which were adapted for the cinema in 1915 (Alias Jimmy Valentine was directed by Maurice Tourneur for World Films, The Regeneration by Raoul Walsh for Fox). Within the Law, too, has a long cinematic history. It was first filmed in 1916, in Australia, in a version directed by Monte Luke and featuring Muriel Starr (which is really a record of the first Australian stage production); then in the U.S. in 1917, directed by William S. Earle for Vitagraph, with Alice Joyce. After the 1923 Norma Talmadge version, Sam Wood directed it for M-G-M in 1930 as Paid, with Joan Crawford; and Gustav Machatý, also for M-G-M, under the original title in 1939, with Ruth Hussey. It has since had radio and television versions.
Talmadge’s film was mostly made in the Metro Studio in Hollywood, but Frank Lloyd and cameraman Antonio Gaudio traveled to New York to meet Joseph Schenck and the Talmadges on their return from a European trip on 2 December 1922, and shot a few location scenes at Manhattan’s municipal jail complex “The Tombs”, in Auburn Prison, and reputedly in the New York subways. In the film as released, the Tombs shots are exteriors, and Talmadge is in some of them; the scenes in the courtyard of Auburn Prison might have been shot in the real location, but many of them include Eileen Percy, who had not yet been cast as Aggie at the time and is not reported to have been in New York then. There are no scenes in the subway. The play moves directly from Mary’s denunciation of Gilder in his office to her apartment after her release from prison and a year of successful blackmailing, so Frances Marion’s adaptation opened up the play to a considerable extent (as the Vitagraph version did, since we know Alice Joyce nearly drowned in the East River during the shooting of the scene of Mary’s suicide attempt).
The part of Mary Turner again offered Talmadge contrasting roles, not by playing two characters (as in Yes or No), but a single character transformed by an unmerited jail sentence. The New York Times remarked that in the first scenes of the movie “she really looks the part of a poor little salesgirl in a big department store.” Variety’s “Women and Clothes” column raved over “Mary’s modish clothes” in the second part, suggesting that “the breach of promise profession is apparently a high and rapid-paying one.” One of the pleasures of this plot is the way that the heroine’s high-class exterior hides the animus of a working girl unjustly accused and punished by her boss and by the legal system which serves his interests. Talmadge does a good job of suggesting the righteous anger that smolders underneath the fashionable clothes and polished façade.
Mary Turner always stays “within the law.” Nevertheless, it is clear her gang makes its money by blackmail. The New York Clipper’s review of the play noted, “There is, however, a serious defect in the character of the heroine which mars the moral tone of the entire play. Mary Turner has, up to the time of her discharge from prison, lived a life beyond reproach. […] Therefore, when she becomes a blackmailer and confidence woman, it causes a certain shock to the finer sensibilities.” At least one review of Talmadge’s film, in Screen Opinions, expressed the same qualms: “If one could forget the unmoral influence of a story which presents the heroine gaining a livelihood through a game of blackmail, in which she keeps discreetly within the law, it would be possible to enthuse over the picture’s entertainment qualities.” The Clipper review dates from the beginning of the play’s career, and the Screen Opinions complaint is not reflected in any of the 1923 exhibitors’ reports, so it seems the huge success of the play in the interval served as a kind of guarantee in 1923 as to the respectability of the subject.

Ben Brewster, Lea Jacobs