Sheila Seymour (Kay Francis) runs an upscale salon and lives a life of luxury. The salon is just a front, though. For Sheila and her shadowy partner, Whitey Colton (Otto Kruger), the real business is operating a stable of beautiful women who marry lonely veterans for their government allotment pay. Once the women have the money, they dump the vets. But Sheila's world begins to fall apart when her daughter (Teala Loring) and a military detective (Paul Kelly) start to put the pieces together.
Allotment Wives, Inc., that’s the name given to the nationwide syndicate at work bilking the government of millions of dollars, operates through bigamous marriages to servicemen. The syndicate is run by hard-as-nails Sheila Seymour (Kay Francis) and a handful of male handlers. These male handlers recruit girls and operate similarly to pimps. The girls are groomed to the scam and then placed in canteens where they meet lonely servicemen. With the spectre of war at everyone’s heels, there’s no time for slow romance, and so the servicemen marry girls they barely know and then go to war. Their brides, engaged in many bigamous marriages at once, turn over their benefits to their handlers, and the handlers in turn report to Sheila Seymour. These arrangements pay off in a different way if the servicemen die in the line of duty. Then the “jackpot” comes in the form of an insurance check.
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