This low-budget but entertaining crime thriller about a dame scheduled to die in the electric chair for a murder that she didn't commit is a fine example of a movie that impugns the death penalty. Mary Kirk Logan (Jean Parker)has been shielding her younger sister Suzy and herself from the truth that her father was a criminal in the pin-ball racket. Nevertheless, one of her father's old accomplices, Willis Millen (Dick Curtis) has come back to blackmail her because he knows that she has some of her dad's dough. Moreover, Millen knows that her stiff, stuck-up, morally superior boss, Gregory (George Irving),will fire her if he catches a whiff of her shady past. Actually, Mary's boss at the bank, who hired her because he needed somebody who he could trust to handle confidential information, played a crucial role in a law and order crusade to put her father behind bars. As it turns out, Mary has been paying a high price to buy the silence of her the silence of her father's former associate. Ironically, the villain who is blackmailing Mary is considered a low-life even by his own kind. Mary has managed to fool Gregory about her checkered past for five years.
"Lady in the Death House" opens with Mary taking the final 39 steps of her life to the electric chair. She has been convicted of a murder that she didn't commit based on the testimony of two passersby who were staring up at the window in her apartment when the murder occurred. All these two spectators really saw was two dark shadows against a fully lighted window with the shade pulled down. Nevertheless, they swear under oath that they saw Mary kill Millen. It doesn't help matters that they rushed up to Mary's apartment after the murder and found the slain man in the floor with the murder weapon--a statue--nearby his body. Millen uttered Mary's name as his final words and the police detective (Cy Kendall)puts two and two together to convict Mary. Since Millen was trying to blackmail Mary, the detective argues that Mary killed Millen to thwart his scheme. Happily for Mary, she knows a tenacious criminologist Charles Finch (Lionel Atwill) who uses his skills to set her free.
"Revenge of the Zombies" director Steve Sekely tells the story in flashback for maximum suspense and doesn't have Mary exonerated until the last three minutes.
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