Isabella Goodwin's big break came in 1912 when she took a job as a boardinghouse scrubwoman for $6 a week.
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Goodwin, a police matron overseeing female inmates, earned her detective shield for going undercover as a scrubwoman to expose a bank robber.
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Set in San Francisco during the early 1900s, the film revolves around Amarilly (Mary Pickford), the daughter of a widowed scrubwoman. Amarilly is proud of her hard-working Irish family, and takes care of her five roughhouse brothers. She is engaged to bartender Terry McGowan (William Scott), who gets her a job as a cigarette girl in his cafe after a fire unfairly causes her to lose her job as a theater scrubwoman. While working as a cigarette girl, she meets Gordon Phillips (Norman Kerry), a handsome and wealthy but frivolous young man, who is a society sculptor.
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Tom Martel, a judge's son, returns to town out West after finishing law school. He becomes involved in a personal feud involving a banker's daughter, Hettie Huston, who attempts to railroad poor scrubwoman Mary Shoemaker in the theft of fifty dollars from a local widow.
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Another nearby large man grabbed the accomplice. The events transpired with such rapidity that few of the service's participants noticed. The scrubwoman, elderly man, and large man had all been planted members of the police. The bomb squad chief had followed the anarchists by limousine, and fifty disguised officers were deployed at the church.
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The book Mansfield reads in the bathtub scene is Peyton Place (1956) by Grace Metalious, which became a feature film and a popular TV series that is claimed to be the forerunner of primetime soap operas. The buxom characters in the book were claimed to have been inspired by Mansfield. Former silent film star Minta Durfee has an uncredited role as a scrubwoman.
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It was discovered by the young daughter of the church's scrubwoman. It was moved to the police headquarters for inspection where, while handled and joked about by detectives, it went off. The explosion killed ten detectives, including one who had been wounded at the September rally, and a bystander who had come to report a robbery. Six additional police personnel were seriously injured: a lieutenant and five detectives.
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Ten years later, Juan Gallardo (now played by Tyrone Power) returns to Seville. He has become a matador and uses his winnings to help his impoverished family. He sets his mother (Alla Nazimova) up in a fine house and enables her to give up her work as a scrubwoman. He also lavishes money on his sister Encarnacion (Lynn Bari) and her fiancé Antonio (William Montague) so they can open a business and wed.
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Perhaps the best actress of the lot is the vivacious scrubwoman, although she has the easy comic role. Good as the acting is, it does not cover up several improbabilities in the plot. It takes the hero a marvelously short time to find out who has been tampering with the books of the company, and he foolishly lets the villain lock the vault doors upon him. A real girl would never have set out to find her escort to the theatre, even if he was late; least of all would she have gone unchaperoned to the office at night.
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Stickney made her Broadway debut in 1926 in The Squall and had a string of hits, frequently playing eccentric characters. She was Liz, the mad scrubwoman, in the original nonmusical version of Chicago, and Mollie Molloy, who dives out of the pressroom window, in The Front Page. With increasingly important roles, she moved on to Philip Goes Forth, Another Language, On Borrowed Time, The Small Hours, To Be Continued and The Honeys. Stickney received the Barter Award for Best Performance of the Year in 1940 for her role as Vinnie in Life with Father, which had been written by her husband, Lindsay, who also co-starred.
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There are several versions of the novel: after the original German text (possibly written in English first) was translated in the United Kingdom, Traven wrote a slightly longer version in English. Just before the German version went to press, the publisher wrote to Traven asking for publicity information and photographs. The author replied: > My personal history would not be disappointing to readers, but it is my own > affair which I want to keep to myself. I am in fact in no way more important > than is the typesetter for my books, the man who works the mill; ... no more > important than the man who binds my books and the woman who wraps them and > the scrubwoman who cleans up the office.
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"May De Sousa A Bankrupt", The New York Times, 28 September 1913 De Sousa retired in 1918, following a theatrical production in Australia, married a local doctor, and eventually moved to Shanghai. In 1943, following a seven-month imprisonment as a civilian internee under the Japanese in Chapei Civil Assembly Center, in Shanghai, China, she returned to the United States on the GripsholmLeck, Greg Captives of Empire: The Japanese Internment of Allied Civilians in China, 1941-1945, pg 533' and took a job in Chicago as a scrubwoman in the public- school system. Her years of internment had taken their toll on her health however, and soon she was forced to quit working because she was too weak to continue. Without means to support herself, her condition worsened through malnutrition and she died, penniless and alone, a charity case in the county hospital on 8 August 1948.
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