|
They make the crazy crazier, says Mencken of newspapers, just the stage for cinema's supreme battle of the sexes. Cyclonic times at the Morning Post, where the newsroom is next to the gallows. "Very little respect for the press around here." The editor is a creatively unscrupulous fellow, "wonderful, in a loathsome sort of way," into him Cary Grant virtuosically pours every comic style from Looney Tunes double-takes to Shakespearean badinage. Rosalind Russell as ace reporter and ex-wife is more than his match, spinning her lanky figure this way and that to bark into telephones and hiking up her skirt to literally tackle an interview. Ready to leave the tabloid life for a respectable chump (Ralph Bellamy), she comes for "a farewell appearance" and is readily tempted back with a scoop involving a shooting turned political hot potato. Sheriff (Gene Lockhart) and mayor (Clarence Kolb) have their own venal interests, the forlorn convict (John Qualen) moves from cage to a poet's roll-top desk, a kennel of cynical newshounds play hard-boiled Greek chorus. All the while, the sustained exhilaration of a typewriter-jockey ditching domesticity and getting into the swing of things. "I say that anybody that can write like that ain't gonna give it up to sew socks for a guy in the insurance business." The Hecht-MacArthur fireworks brilliantly engineered by Howard Hawks as the kinetic-combative essence of romance in a sea of corruption, a saltando screwball front for a startlingly bleak worldview. Abner Biberman's grinning hoodlum, Billy Gilbert's befuddled messenger, a circle of priceless character actors all keyed to the pure thrill of verbal velocity. (The solitary hush comes when a lament from Helen Mack's demimondaine interrupts a game of cards.) "Take Hitler and stick him on the funny page!" A training film for Sturges and Altman, and for every comedy filmmaker worth their salt. Cinematography by Joseph Walker. With Porter Hall, Ernest Truex, Cliff Edwards, Roscoe Karns, Frank Jenks, Regis Toomey, Frank Orth, Alma Kruger, Pat West, and Edwin Maxwell. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |