Phyllis Barrington on AllMovie

A professional dancer from childhood, Phyllis Barrington was awarded a screen contract with redoubtable low-budget producer Willis Kent who starred her as the blonde looker in Law of the Tong (1931), the first in a series of Phyllis Barrington Specials. She played a dancehall hostess stranded in the middle of a Tong war in San Francisco's Chinatown, and the lurid film was typical of all the "specials" that bore her name: Playthings of Hollywood (1931), Scarlet Weekend (1932), The Drifter (1932), and Sucker Money (1933). Produced on the proverbial shoestring budget and featuring a great many otherwise unemployable silent screen "names," the Kent/Barrington programmers were mainly distributed outside of Hollywood's usual channels and thus escaped scrutiny from both reviewers and the production code censors.