Two Seconds

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Two Seconds is a 1932 film directed by Mervyn LeRoy and starring Edward G. Robinson.

[edit] Plot

John Allen, a condemned murderer, relives the events that led to him being sentenced to death in the electric chair during the last two seconds of his life. He worked with his friend and flatmate Bud Clark as a riviter. Bud is engaged to be married, and tries to set up a date for Allen, but Allen is uninterested. He goes to a dance hall, where he meets dancer Shirley Day. He defends her from an amorous patron, and she is fired by Tony, the proprietor who is also her lover. Allen wants to be with an educated woman, and Shirley pretends to be interested in attending a lecture with him. Instead, they go to a speakeasy on her persuasion, and she gets him drunk on "tea." Shirley bribes a justice of the peace to marry then, to which he impulsively agrees. When they return to Allen's apartment, Shirley throws Bud out. Almost immediately, Shirley begins seeing Tony. When, three weeks after the marriage, Bud tells Allen that Shirley is unfaithful they fight, and Bud falls to his death from a skyscraper girder. The grief-stricken Allen then quits his job, but is demoralized by living on Shirley's ill-gotten money. Later Shirley pretends to repent and tells Allen that she has been meeting with Tony in order to borrow money from him, and to help Bud's finace Annie to get a job at the dance hall. Allen then places money on horses in order to obtain the money to pay off the debts he thinks he owes Tony, which he does. He then heads to Tony's house with the money, and finds that Bud was telling the truth, and Shirley had been lying to him. Jealous, he kills Shirley and is sentenced to the electric chair. At his trial Allen refuses all defences saying he should have been killed when he was at his lowest, not when he had been avenged. As the switch is pulled, Allen reflects on how he got away with Clark's unjustified death, but was condemned for Shirley's justifiable murder.

[edit] Cast

[edit] External links

v • d • e
Films Directed by Mervyn LeRoy
Little Caesar (1931) • Five Star Final (1931) • Tonight or Never (1931) • Two Seconds (1932) • Three on a Match (1932) • I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932) • Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933) • Tugboat Annie (1933) • The World Changes (1933) • Anthony Adverse (1936) • Waterloo Bridge (1940) • Escape (1940) • Blossoms in the Dust (1941) • Random Harvest (1942) • Madame Curie (1943) • Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944) • The House I Live In (1945) • Without Reservations (1946) • Little Women (1949) • Quo Vadis (1951) • Million Dollar Mermaid (1952) • Mister Roberts (1955) • The Bad Seed (1956) • Toward the Unknown (1956) • No Time for Sergeants (1958) • The FBI Story (1959) • A Majority of One (1961) • Gypsy (1962)