Aventure à Manhattan

This is a fun film for all Jean Arthur and Joel McCrea fans and it is available online. The basic premise is that Joel McCrea is a likable newshound who angers some of his cronies with his boundless ego and they play a little joke on him. Enter Jean Arthur. After some ready made coincidences and a lot of tomfoolery the mystery is solved. In between we have some ideas stolen from earlier pictures and at least a couple that are stolen for later films. I find that kind of stuff fun so I definitely recommend this one as time well spent.

It could have been a good, tough crime heist film without those comedy lines. A true excellent bank heist, through a tunnel, not an armed robbery plot. But Edward Ludwig, whose speciality will be adventure movies - CARIBBEAN, JIVARO, SANGAREE - Ed Ludwig missed the opportunity to give us a good film noir. He did it with THE LAST GANGSTER though, starring Edward G Robinson, for Metro Goldwyn Mayer, not a real tough and gritty noir either, but still good. So, back to this one, even the Joel McCrea's presence doesn't save the whole for me. Just entertaining, fun, yes, but with such crime ingredients, it could have been different and better. As if you decided to prepare an excellent dish, with the adequate ingredients choice and quantity, but with the wrong cooking time on the cooker or in the oven.

I have long admired Jean Arthur, so when I came across one of her films I did not know I naturally jumped at the chance to watch it. I did not even bother to read any of the reviews here or elsewhere in advance. As it turns out, that was probably the right decision: Some of these reviews might have prejudiced me against this near-perfect 1930s comedy. The plot is too convoluted to summarise here, but director Edward Ludwig manages to present it in a way that makes every twist and turn, however zany, look plausible (at least for the moment). He also gives 'Adventure in Manhattan' great tempo and pace: there is never a dull moment, and many moments that are simply hilarious. Joel McCrea plays a criminologist with a Sherlock Holmes-like ability to put himself in a master-thief's position and to second-guess the thief's plans. As his predictions come true he is so full of himself that one failure is truly devastating. Jean Arthur is great as an actress who thinks he is nuisance but eventually falls in love with him. The dialogues are spot on: sharp and witty. In sum, this is as nice a comedy as you will find: don't believe the reviewers who jumped on the bandwagon talking it down!

After a big success in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town which really established Jean Arthur as the rival in screwball comedy to Carole Lombard, she got cast in some routine films that sought to take advantage of her new image. Adventure in Manhattan was one of them and while it's plot verges on the silly it could have been a lot better, but for some really bad miscasting.

The guy who could have brought off the role of the wise cracking crime reporter was over at Warner Brothers. This part James Cagney could have phoned over to Columbia, but in the hands of all American hero Joel McCrea it really looks forced.

Some high profile robberies have taken place and crime reporter McCrea thinks and has written that the culprit of all these has been a master criminal along the lines of Professor Moriarty. Problem is that this guy is believed dead by all, but McCrea.

McCrea is right and it's revealed early enough in the film to be Reginald Owen who is now in the guise of a theatrical producer. And Jean Arthur is an aspiring young ingénue in the cast of a World War I play he's producing.

One of the problems I had with this plot was that Professor Moriarty and many of the master criminals in real life and fiction usually work alone or with as few accomplices as possible. The scheme that Owen has involves a considerable gang and I really can't swallow that somewhere along the line somebody doesn't slip up.

Thomas Mitchell in one of his earliest screen roles is McCrea's editor and he's his usual good self. Arthur makes the best of a routine assignment and it took someone like Preston Sturges to bring out the real comedian in Joel McCrea.

Joel McCrea gets robbed of his wallet by some weird blonde, who proves to be mixed up with the theatre business, while he is a controversial journalist who is famous for presenting predictions that come true. It's a screwball comedy with straight and witty dialog all the way getting smarter all the time, as the plot gradually thickens, and a great bank robbery is synchronized with a great premiere of a first world war drama with reckless gunfire, bombs, explosions and plenty of smoke, and for some reason Jean Arthur gets the hang of it. She is brilliant, and so is Joel McCrea, they work splendidly together as an odd couple in constant arguments with each other about their incurable differtences, but it's a comedy - nothing to worry about.