Whipsaw

Government agent Ross McBride is on the trail of stolen pearls. Pretending to be a crook, he tags onto Vivian Palmer on a cross country trail in the hope that she will lead him to her partners. However, she quickly discovers the truth, which puts each of them in a difficult position.

A film which flows smoothly throughout and one which works on two levels, as a crime drama and a love story, even if an unlikely one at the start. Add in the talents of Myrna Loy and Spencer Tracy and it becomes something which is worth watching.

Whipsaw (1935)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

Myrna Loy is in with jewel thieves when she runs into another mug (Spencer Tracy) who's actually an undercover cop. Loy, knowing his real identity, plays along and the two hit the road with Tracy hoping she'll lead him to her gang. Considering the talent involve you have to put this one down as a minor disappointment even though there's still a lot of stuff to enjoy. The biggest problem with the film is that it's rather flat and doesn't contain too much energy outside of the performances. It seems the film never knew if it wanted to be a drama, a romantic comedy or perhaps just a romantic melodrama. It doesn't really do any of them things very well as there aren't too many laughs and the drama isn't really there as the story is pretty predictable. What does work is the romantic angle thanks in large part to the wonderful performances by Loy and Tracy. Loy makes for a terrific leading lady and comes off quite sensitive to the point where you have no problem seeing why the agent Tracy would fall for her. Tracy plays it pretty tough and believable but has no trouble sinking into his wonderful charm. The two of them together makes for a great couple and they certainly keep the rather standard screenplay going. John Qualen plays a farmer who the leads meet half way through the film and he delivers nice work as well. While there's no question a stronger screenplay would have done wonders with the film there's also no doubt that Loy and Tracy really shine here. Fans of the stars will probably find themselves enjoying this a lot more due to them.

There are some good scenes but in general there's a forced contrivance to the playing, and the action scenes are amateurish. The plot of jewel thieves is preposterous and annoyingly depicted. Tracy and Loy are good as always but not enough to overcome a general feeling of lifelessness. However, John Qualen appears about 2/3 through and adds a spark by breathing life into the country-farmer cliche.

Myrna Loy play Vivian, a woman who helps a gang of jewel thieves, but not on this particular heist of some pearls. A rival gang knows that Vivian is associated with the thieves, and is watching her so that when she heads off to rendezvous with the gang that they can follow her to the pearls. And this rival gang does not consist of nice guys. They have no problem with killing people who get in their way.

Spencer Tracy is a federal agent pretending to be an ex-con so he can travel along with Vivian and apprehend the jewel thieves when she unwittingly leads him to them. But Vivian realizes he is a cop and is trying to find a way to get away from him without letting him know that she knows.

Then they run into a bad rainstorm out in the middle of nowhere and stop at the house of a man whose wife is having a baby - two of them actually. And it is there that everything changes in a way you could probably write yourself if you:

1. Are familiar with how MGM of the 1930s often shoehorned these rustic scenes into films to get the city slickers to come to their senses.

2. realize the vagaries of the production code.

3. can paint by numbers

The acting is the real reason to hang around. Myrna Loy is playing the elegant person she portrayed in so many films made after The Thin Man. Spencer Tracy is in the final phase of his "tough guy" era which he was in over at Fox and at first at MGM, even if he is just pretending to be a tough guy here. And in fact he is portraying somebody who is acting, which can't be easy to do subtly. It is interesting to see how the two play off of each other and attempt to keep up a believable front.

MGM Studio execs. may have have wondered whether Director Sam Wood wasn't taking something of a risk when he hired Spencer Tracy (recently released by Fox, and known primarily for his action-packed B films) to play a tough-guy romantic lead in "Whipsaw" opposite Myrna Loy (fresh off a big success the previous year in "The Thin Man") but Wood knew what he was doing. The result is excellent. Tracy and Loy have terrific screen chemistry together in this 1935 cops-and-robbers movie. It doesn't even matter that the plot isn't particularly fresh, or that the dialogue doesn't always sparkle; the pleasure to be had in "Whipsaw" lies in watching these two screen pros slowly build a portrait of completely disparate characters who overcome their prejudices and their "better" judgments and fall in love. Since Spencer Tracy always played Spencer Tracy (no matter who the character he was portraying may have been) Myrna Loy had the more difficult transformation to accomplish here, and she comes up aces. Her performance is nuanced and understated and she's an elegant, intelligent foil to Tracy's more down-to-earth, beefy, good-guy persona. There's fine supporting work, too, from the secondary characters with John Qualen taking standout honors as a mild-mannered Midwestern farmer; and appropriately "noirish" cinematography from James Wong Howe. But the real story here is the performance by Loy and Tracy. In the flood of terrific movies that the '30's gave to us, "Whipsaw" is often overlooked. It shouldn't be.