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The New York skyline behind the opening credits turns out to be a maquette made of beauty salon products, Joan Bennett strides by like a colossus. The manicurist and the flatfoot, the latter is Cary Grant, already confident enough to wear a box like a hat and do a Mae West impression. "Well, I'm not supposed to be funny. I'm a cop." Screwball snap plus underworld menace: Jewel thieves on the prowl—including a crooked insurance investigator (Walter Pidgeon) and a racketeer with a floral yen (Lloyd Nolan)—handle the serious side of the equation. The heroine turns newspaper reporter to help snatch the hoodlum, whose botched loot exchange on Central Park ends with a bullet in a baby stroller. "He doesn't deserve a chair. They ought to fry him standing up." The Raoul Walsh liveliness is everywhere, his technique is of special interest. (Montages of canted close-ups in succession take care of exposition, personifying the keen, kaleidoscopic timbre of the film.) On one side of the law a witness (Isabel Jewell) is intimidated into silence, on the other a mug (Douglas Fowley) is tricked into squealing, dirty tricks are integral to the racy fabric. Hard-boiled putdowns, underworld malapropisms and high-society prattle, almost as rich a tessitura as Me and My Gal. "Honey, when you're in love, you can be lonesome anywhere." Double-talk routines and forensic searches, the killer who admires the eyes on a Rembrandt portrait and the meticulous build-up to a rubout that's suddenly punctuated by a ventriloquism gag. Lights out before the ending, "you'd be surprised what you can do in the dark." With Alan Baxter, Marjorie Gateson, Henry Brandon and Joe Sawyer. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |