An old superstition says that if three people all light their cigarettes from the same lit match, the third person will die soon. That’s what happens after three women who knew each other in grade school reunite as adults. Ann Dvorak is the happiest of the three, but her pampered life flies out of control when she falls for some dumb jerk-off who’s up to his balls in mob debt and she leaves her husband. She ends up a desperate drug addict begging for money on the street. How did all of that come to be? She was third on the match, of course. She was cursed.
This is most well-known for being one of the more outrageous pre-Production Code Hollywood films. Among the sleazy stuff here that would have been forbidden two years later: hints of cocaine use, a depiction of cocaine withdrawal symptoms, gangsters plotting to kill a five year old boy, and a graphic scene of someone plummeting to their death from a high window. The adultery stuff might have been too scandalous for 1934, too.
Humphrey Bogart, before he became famous, shows up in a supporting role as a vicious crook. A pubescent Jack Webb shows up briefly in the beginning as a school boy.