Murder in Greenwich Village

Fay Wray climbs out of a window in her slip while Richard Arlen watches admiringly from the street. He takes her to his studio, where he and his cohort of eccentrics run an advertising studio on the cheap. Meanwhile, in the apartment whence she came, an artist is murdered. When the police come to question the people in the studio, Arlen and Wray pretend to be engaged to give her an alibi.

It's an attempt to merge screwball comedy with a murder mystery. While there are some funny bits -- particularly Raymond Walburn as a down-and-out politician who alternates talking about McKinley, drinking and posing -- it is a poor screwball, because the central characters lack eccentricity and chemistry. There are dumb, malapropism-spouting cops, and Marc Lawrence gets a good role as a hood who's the brother of the murdered man, but Albert Rogell's lugubrious pacing bogs down an interesting script. There are some fine performers present, including Thurston Hall, Leon Ames and Marjorie Reynolds, but they are curiously ineffective.