Ann Vickers

From Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winner Sinclair Lewis, creator of Babbitt, Dodsworth and Elmer Gantry, comes a progressive modern heroine who opts for self-fulfillment in social causes rather than via "women's wiles." The role of Ann Vickers is a smart fit for Irene Dunne, who wowed audiences in similar long-suffering plum roles in Cimarron, Symphony of Six Million and Back Street. Here she enters daring -- and significantly nonjudgmental -- pre-Code territory. Left pregnant by a soldier who is shipped off to World War I, social worker Vickers vows to live on her own terms, sans marriage. After a stint as a prison sociologist, she writes an expose of dire jail conditions and opens a women's reformatory. That connects her with an unhappily married judge (Walter Huston, the future embodiment of Lewis's Dodsworth), who is jailed on corruption charges -- soon after Vickers has borne their love child. Bruce Cabot, Edna May Oliver and Conrad Nagel costar under the smooth direction of John Cromwell, who would return to the penal system 17 years later with Caged.