There is a better term to classify a film like this: it is more a dramatic comedy, than a crime melodrama. Although it is melodramatic here and there and little crimes do occur, there is a funny undercurrent all the time in this fascinating little movie based on Ben Hecht's short story «Caballero of the Law».
As cinephiles know, Hecht was a prominent storyteller, playwright and screenwriter. In the first Oscar ceremony in 1929, he won the Best Story award for Josef von Sternberg's «Underworld», a tale that was remade twice as «Scarface». His list of credits (with colleague Charles MacArthur) is impressive, from writing classics like «Notorious» for Hitchcock, to rewriting «Gone with the Wind», for which he received 10 thousand dollars, but no credit. The Oscar went to someone else.
Hecht also directed several features with MacArthur and cinematographer Lee Garmes. I recently watched «Crime Without Passion», their promising first film, a story of lust, jealousy and corruption, centered on the cynical lawyer Lee Gentry (Rains), a surname if not suggesting his origins, at least it does point at his aspirations. He is an expert in freeing criminals from prison or death, through his ability to find technicalities and loopholes that support his allegations, or simply by cheating.
However, Gentry's downfall is his jealousy: he wants to marry an elegant, upper-class blonde (Bourne), but he can't break up with Carmen Brown (Mexican Margo, who was only 16 when she made this, her first movie). Carmen is a showgirl he perversely harasses and she answers back tempting him. The verbal battles abound here, but you rarely hear this slick and fascinating vocabulary anymore. The vision of the film is pleasant, its plot is enlightening and it has a delicate humorous touch - evident, for example, in the Hecht-MacArthur play «The Front Page», which has been filmed so many times, including the Howard Hawks classic «His Girl Friday»).
I must add that what really led me to the film was its prologue conceived by Serbian editor and director Slavko Vorkapich, and available independently from the picture. In the introductory montage, a woman is shot by a (surely jealous) man and the three avenging Furies (Roman version of the original Greek deities Erinyes) emerge from three drops of her blood, fly above the city, spot several couples in private foreplay and laugh out with lethal echoes. The prologue alone is memorable, but watch the whole film. The delirium and richness of its visuals and verbal exchanges made in 1934, and still with so much relevance, are not frequent these days. Neither are people like Ben Hecht.
As cinephiles know, Hecht was a prominent storyteller, playwright and screenwriter. In the first Oscar ceremony in 1929, he won the Best Story award for Josef von Sternberg's «Underworld», a tale that was remade twice as «Scarface». His list of credits (with colleague Charles MacArthur) is impressive, from writing classics like «Notorious» for Hitchcock, to rewriting «Gone with the Wind», for which he received 10 thousand dollars, but no credit. The Oscar went to someone else.
Hecht also directed several features with MacArthur and cinematographer Lee Garmes. I recently watched «Crime Without Passion», their promising first film, a story of lust, jealousy and corruption, centered on the cynical lawyer Lee Gentry (Rains), a surname if not suggesting his origins, at least it does point at his aspirations. He is an expert in freeing criminals from prison or death, through his ability to find technicalities and loopholes that support his allegations, or simply by cheating.
However, Gentry's downfall is his jealousy: he wants to marry an elegant, upper-class blonde (Bourne), but he can't break up with Carmen Brown (Mexican Margo, who was only 16 when she made this, her first movie). Carmen is a showgirl he perversely harasses and she answers back tempting him. The verbal battles abound here, but you rarely hear this slick and fascinating vocabulary anymore. The vision of the film is pleasant, its plot is enlightening and it has a delicate humorous touch - evident, for example, in the Hecht-MacArthur play «The Front Page», which has been filmed so many times, including the Howard Hawks classic «His Girl Friday»).
I must add that what really led me to the film was its prologue conceived by Serbian editor and director Slavko Vorkapich, and available independently from the picture. In the introductory montage, a woman is shot by a (surely jealous) man and the three avenging Furies (Roman version of the original Greek deities Erinyes) emerge from three drops of her blood, fly above the city, spot several couples in private foreplay and laugh out with lethal echoes. The prologue alone is memorable, but watch the whole film. The delirium and richness of its visuals and verbal exchanges made in 1934, and still with so much relevance, are not frequent these days. Neither are people like Ben Hecht.