They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1935)

A Depression-era dance marathon offers food and the possibility of prize money to people with few alternatives. Robert and Gloria enter a competition whose rules make exhaustion profitable for everyone except the dancers. McCoy turns an apparently reasonable attempt to survive into a tightening public spectacle. Choose this for economic desperation and bitter fatalism rather than a robbery or police investigation. The darkness includes suicidal despair and a deliberate lack of consolation.