On a volé les perles Koronoff

Ed Dexter and Harry Ames are a jewel thief team. Doc Evans and Steve Arnold lead a rival team. They threaten Ed and Harry over a valuable target. Ed and Harry turn them in with an anonymous call to the cops. Ed and Harry manage to steal the jewels while their rivals are in custody. The cops know that Vivian Palmer (Myrna Loy) is connected to the thieves. Agent Ross McBride (Spencer Tracy) goes undercover as a crook named Danny Ackerman and makes contact with Vivian.

Vivian is too obvious with her disbelief of Danny right from the start. She should hide it a lot better than that. Also I don't buy their romance. That's the biggest issue. It feels forced. The whole story feels a bit forced. I do love Tracy and Loy as individual performers. In another movie, they may be a good pairing.

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.

Whipsaw is the picture that answers that burning question in the title.

This was Spencer Tracy's second film under his new MGM contract when he switched studios from Fox in 1935. With few exceptions Tracy starred in routine action films while at Fox and working in Whipsaw must have made Spence feel he was still at Fox. Other than the fact Louis B. Mayer instead of Darryl Zanuck was signing his paycheck, he wouldn't have known the difference from the quality of material he was being asked to do.

Myrna Loy however had already found her screen persona in The Thin Man a year earlier at MGM. So why she was asked to do Whipsaw is beyond me.

Basically the plot is Myrna is the confederate of jewel thief Harvey Stephens who's just made a big score. Stephens has a problem though, he's got to watch out for the law and for another gang who wanted in on the robbery.

The FBI has decided that the best way to Stephens is through Myrna and they've sent ace G-Man Spencer Tracy to work undercover and gain her confidence. Of course Spence gains more than her confidence.

So how will it work out for our intrepid duo? See the film if you are big fan of both of the stars, but only if that. Myrna and Spence both did much better work.

But big things were breaking for Tracy soon. He got cast as Father Timothy Mullin in San Francisco, got the first of his Oscar nominations, changed his screen image, and the rest as he later said in one of his better films is cherce.

As for Loy, I'm sure she was grateful to get back to working with William Powell in another Thin Man film. In fact she got to work with Powell and Tracy in Libelled Lady one of the best screen comedies from MGM ever. See that film by all means.

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.

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.