On Such a Night (1937)

In Louisiana, gangster Ice Richmond blackmails Nicky Last, who has been trying to go straight, to take the rap for a murder charge by threatening to hurt Nicky's famous actress wife, Gail Stanley. Nicky is convicted and sentenced to execution, but refuses to tell his wife what really happened. She hires attorney Horace Darwin to get an appeal, but Darwin drops the case under pressure from Ice. On the night of the execution, Ice, who has introduced himself to Gail as a friend of Nicky's, Gail and newspaper reporter Joe Flynn, who is on Gail's side, head to the prison but are delayed by massive flooding. They are forced to leave the bus and join thousands of refugees at a Red Cross center. The onslaught of rain and floods causes the prison to delay Nicky's execution and transfer him to another prison, but the car he is traveling in is washed away. His guard, who arrives at the center badly hurt, believes Nicky drowned, and Flynn spreads the news, but Gail finds Nicky unconscious on a nearby cot. She desperately steals a Red Cross armband and impersonates a nurse, then hires a flamboyant magician and his wife, Richard and Mimi Candle, to transport her and Nicky away from the refugee center in their trailer. Gail narrowly avoids the company of Ice on her trip, but he becomes wise to her scheme, and he and Flynn follow in pursuit. The Candles are forced to stop at a mansion, Fentridge Hall, because of severe flooding. Colonel Fentridge and his spinster sister Belinda graciously provide accommodations for the group. Nicky recovers, and seeing his survival as an act of God, is determined finally to fight Ice. After Flynn and Ice arrive, news is heard on the radio that the dam is breaking, and rising waters inside the mansion force the refugees up into the attic. Ice prevents them from signaling a rescue plane, so Nicky bravely swims out the attic window, into which water is rushing, to the estate levee and dynamites it. Everyone is rescued, and Nicky and Gail are permanently reunited after Ice is convicted of murder.