|
"The bad old days" of Jazz Age venality, a screwball nostalgia piece. The heroine (Ginger Rogers) is a half-bright flapper parachuted gams-first into a tenement shootout—a throwaway tabloid item until a spiky refugee from The Front Page (Lynne Overman) juices it up into a sensational scandal and the gum-chewer becomes a star prisoner. The brassy center of a fickle media whirlwind, she takes advantage of Chicago's gallantry and horniness, is leered at, doted over, and celebrated (she's "a garden of hollyhocks," or, simply, "female and ambitious"). The smitten journalist (George Montgomery) offers the carnival as a saloon remembrance, "we haven't had a good murder story in this town since the Democrats got hold of the country." Nunnally Johnson's screenplay is a tart ode to scoundrels and floozies, William Wellman orchestrates it with plenty of what Manny Farber called "practical-joke violence." (The entire first reel of Nothing Sacred is rolled up into a single joke with Roxie's Ma and Pa on a porch.) The outstanding gallery of connivers and clods includes George Chandler as the hapless hubby, Phil Silvers as the photographer swooping in to capture courtroom frenzies, and Adolphe Menjou in a superb rendition of the silver-tongued shyster in full flight. Visiting Brits like Nigel Bruce's theatrical agent and Sara Allgood's prison matron (who resolves a catfight between jailbirds with a well-placed head-conk) add their appreciation for the American madness. The ending accommodates William Frawley's note of Chekhovian longing, and recognizes the lateral move from the gallows to the household. "This picture is dedicated to all the beautiful women in the world who have shot their men full of holes out of pique." With Spring Byington, Iris Adrian, Ted North, Morris Ankrum, Helene Reynolds, Charles D. Brown, Milton Parsons, and Jeff Corey. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |