Directed by Wesley Ruggles
Written by Claude Binyon from the play “Mon crime” by Louis Verneuil and Georges Berr
1937/USA
Paramount Pictures
First viewing
This is a pleasant enough light comedy.
Opposites attract. Lawyer Kenneth Bartlett (Fred MacMurray) is so honest that he refuses to defend the guilty. Naturally his law practice is going nowhere. His wife Helen (Carole Lombard) is a novelist and comes up with the most outlandish woppers on a moment’s notice to get out of a jam. She secretly accepts a job as a private secretary to help out with the finances but discovers the boss is looking for more than she bargained for. After a struggle she flees his flat, leaving her purse and coat. When she goes back to retrieve them, he has been murdered. She tries to explain to Kenneth that she didn’t murder the man but he doesn’t believe her. She then allows him to defend her under a plea of self-defense. With Una Merkel as Helen’s best friend and John Barrymore as a self-styled “criminologist”.
All the actors except Lombard and Barrymore are OK in this. Lombard is better than OK and Barrymore once again demonstrated that he was coasting on fumes by the mid-30’s. The material is light and breezy but it didn’t make me laugh.
Clip – typewriter scene
This isn’t related to this post, but to a comment you made a few days ago on TSorensen’s blog. You asked about the new numbering of the 1,001 Movies list. I offered to email you the tracking sheet with all the updates, but I guess you’ve not revisited that comment.
If you would like it I can either email it to you, if you give me your address, or you can view/download it at my Lists from Chip site.
Thank you so much, Chip! Sorry, I did not think to look again at the comment. I went straight to your site and downloaded the new list. I appreciate so much all you do.
You’re welcome. Hopefully you find that sheet useful for tracking what you have seen and reviewed. If you find anything on it that you feel is in error, please let me know.
FYI – I used what I felt was the most common name for the films that had multiple ones. Sometimes this means I used the American name (i.e. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly) and sometimes the foreign name (i.e. Ikiru). It also means that sometimes I have a different name than what the book does because some of their English language titles are ones no one has ever heard of. They appear to be literal translations instead of the name the film was released under in the North American market (i.e. The Fiends for Les Diaboliques, instead of Diabolique.)
Finally, I made a conscious decision to not remove the leading articles from foreign film titles for alphabetizing. For instance, Das Boot appears under the letter D, not B. I did this because I figured more people were likely to not know articles across the various foreign languages (das, die, der, le, la, les, il, un, une, etc.) and to just look for the film alphabetized by the first letter of the first word.
All English titles have the articles moved to the end of the name, though.