Nicely pre-Code but rather hack-written MGM programmer, wherein nice blue-collar cabby Phillips Holmes and nice wifey Anita Page come under the heavy thumb of Judge Walter Huston, who's incredibly corrupt. Huston, with a dashing mustache, relishes his bad-guy histrionics, and it's fun to see Metro toiling in the lower-class provenance of Warners. But the social consciousness is awkward: Huston's so all-bad and enemy Lewis Stone so all-good that these good actors can't do much to make their roles interesting, while the always-too-pretty Holmes is given to some theatrical, unconvincing soliloquizing. We're also asked to sympathize with and root for him when he kidnaps Huston, gags him, ties him to a chair, and beats him up. Virtue does triumph; we know because there's a shot of a newspaper headline saying something like "Vice Banished Forever from City, D.A. Says." There's also an annoyingly cute baby. W.S. Van Dyke directs at about half the pace Mervyn LeRoy or Howard Hawks would have employed at Warners, and Page is given to scene after scene of screaming and wailing. It's fun as a time capsule, but other studios, notably Warners, were handling material like this with much more finesse.
Review of Night Court
