Broadway Musketeers 1938

Isabel Dowling, Margaret Lindsay, Fay Reynolds, Ann Sheridan, and Connie Todd, Marie Wilson, are three women who grew up together in an orphanage and meet again later in life. Each woman’s life has taken a very different path: Isabel is married with a young daughter, Connie works as an office secretary, and Fay performs in nightclubs. The trio is drawn back together when Fay is arrested for performing a striptease, and Isabel and Connie come to bail her out. They vow to keep in touch every year on the same day, at the same restaurant, to remind themselves of their shared past and the bonds that still connect them.

Isabel is bored and unhappy in her marriage. Her husband, Stan Dowling, goes away to California. When she and Connie go to a nightclub to watch Fay sing, Isabel meets gambler Phil Peyton, and the two begin an affair. An automobile accident amid the headlines occurs just as Stan returns to New York. Their daughter Judy Dowling, Janet Chapman, has her life touched by these events through the nurse Anna, Dorothy Adams, who informs Stan of the affair. At the hospital, Fay tries to cover for Isabel. Dowling divorces Isabel and retains custody of their daughter, Judy. Isabel then marries Phil, whose gambling rapidly ruins them. Meanwhile, Fay and Stan fall in love and marry.

Isabel has been separated from her daughter for some time when Fay takes pity on her and allows Judy to visit. Phil uses Judy as security against his debts, and the gangsters he owes money to discover the deception. They kill Phil and decide to hold on to Judy, expecting to ransom her while letting the police assume Isabel killed Phil. Isabel overhears the gangsters planning to kill both of them to cover their crimes. One of the gang members, Milt, Dewey Robinson, has grown fond of Judy and protests when the plan escalates, but he is killed. In a desperate bid to save her daughter, Isabel tears a front page from a newspaper emblazoned with the headline “Held by Murder Gang” over photos of herself and Judy, clutches it, and leaps through a closed window to her death on the pavement below, sacrificing her life to reveal Judy’s location to the police. Judy is rescued. At the trio’s next ritual birthday gathering—a celebration of Connie’s impending marriage to her boss, who turns out to be love-sick rather than hypochondriacal—little Judy arrives to take her mother’s place at the table, bringing the story full circle and leaving tomorrow’s promise to the next reunion.