Maybe I was expecting too much, given the superior ratings from Maltin and TCM. It's a good film but hardly memorable. The plot itself amounts to a routine crime plot—not really a mystery. However, the movie's strengths are not found in the storyline. Rather they're found in the characters and in a provocative subtext. Baxter's excellent as the shyster lawyer who pretends to principles even as he maintains underworld ties (Pendleton). Holmes, Clarke, and Sleeper are also excellent as attractive youngsters; at the same time, it's too bad they drop out of the story as soon as they do.
Nonetheless, reviewer Neil Doyle is right, although it's probably an unpopular opinion— Myrna Loy is indeed miscast as a call girl. She's got all the properly suggestive lines, but her natural bearing and classy demeanor are simply unsuited to a wanton role. My guess is that the producers wanted a classy dame since Baxter must end up marrying her. Still and all, those traits that make her such a perfect Nora Charles, also make her an implausible call girl. All things considered, Clarke would have been more suitable as the call girl, but marrying her brassier character would have also been less believable. So I guess the producers were in something of a bind.
There is of course a lot of naughty innuendo as can be expected from this pre-Code era. But what surprises me in the subtext is the forced confession from pint-sized Murtoch (Stone). It's not just Durant (Baxter) who's threatening to shoot a man and frame the little gunsel. It's the cops too, including police Lieutenant Stevens (O'Connor), and no one appears surprised that the cops would collude in such a heinous criminal act. It's as if in this film, they do it every day. No wonder the impending Production Code put such rigid strictures on how cops could be portrayed, given the social unrest of the time. On the other hand, 1933 is also the headline era of Capone and a wide-open city of Chicago, so maybe the script is not far off the mark, after all.
Anyway, I guess from other postings that Pendleton's rather comedic Tony Gazotti is a matter of taste. I would have preferred a harder case gangster that would have made Baxter's Durant an even more ambiguous character than he is. Nonetheless, the number of nice touches (the elevator man; the brassy girl leaving the bar), along with Van Dyke's smooth direction, help make this an interesting and entertaining 90 minutes. But 3.5 stars out of 4 (TCM), it's not.
