Review of Kansas City Confidential (1952)
Seen in 2022.
Coleen Gray is just hilarious in this movie. She doesn’t play it comically at all, but everything about her character says shoe-horned romance narrative: She is relevant to the narrative because unbeknownst to her, her father is the main villain, but she is otherwise a wholesome law student in a world of bank robbers who meets the hero almost at random. She’s a walking Hays Code snorkel right up to the final shot.
References here: Reservoir Dogs (1992), A Time to Kill (1996).