1934 Directed by Dorothy Davenport
When a radio star is found murdered in her home, everyone assumes that the mysterious young woman discovered with her is the culprit — everyone, that is, but newspaper reporter Jerry Beall, who sets out to prove her innocence.
USA
USA
Props to the movie for stopping dead in its tracks for about a 7 minute ‘Night Court’ type scene, you know, without the dumb sitcom jokes and laugh-track. I loved when one woman was ‘turned over to her husband’ after sentencing. Wild, man.
I always feel bad when I go to bed without watching at least something, so I threw on this relatively short film, and... I should have just went to bed.
"I'll either get you out of this mess, or get myself in."
Shoddy, penny-pinching sets but Dorothy Davenport applies a kind of indie 30's charm to the cracks of an otherwise terrible B-movie. Plus I don't know, Dell and Hemingway seem comfy together, so I felt comfy.
Imagine you're stuck at night court for public intoxication or whatever and the judge just decides, on a whim, to marry two random ass people to one another
This movie is a fucking mess and that’s all that can really be said about it. I don’t know if ADR was a practice done at this time, but the discrepancy between the lips and audio was beyond distracting. And most importantly, this had an awful script with poor pacing and felt like it did not translate well as a talkie.
Honestly really cool to see a low budget indie from the 30’s. Love that even back then they still made strange pseudo-genre pieces on low budgets. And that they had good excuses for using slang terms for jail! There’s no better decade for jail-based slang terms than the 30’s, lemme tell ya.
Anyways I don’t know how much it really does for me. But it’s cool that this exists!
From Indy Progressive Pictures & now Red Rocket Media comes a chick flick directed by Mrs Wallace Reid a/k/a Dorothy Davenport one of the few female directors working in Hollywood's golden era. I liked this new discovery for me.
Bonkers melodrama, charmingly cheap, about a popular radio singer who takes an unexplained hiatus and hides in her apartment, leading her lovestruck boss to hire a detective to find her, whereupon a brassy blonde shows up and gets arrested for trying to break into the singer's apartment. The blonde goes to night court, where a cheerful reporter pretends to be her fiancé to get her out of trouble. Then the singer gets murdered and the blonde is blamed, but she didn't do it, but she won't explain why she was at the scene of the murder, either. Movie also contains a mad scientist doctor and a few colorful female characters in the night court scene (an inspiration for the sitcom?). It's weird and goofy and only 65 minutes long on Criterion Channel.
Interesting as an early film directed by a woman, uninteresting in every other aspect
Uneven mystery comedy in which a reporter winds up married to a night court defendant. She's then accused of murdering a radio star. Might be okay for a rainy afternoon but not that special. Directed by former silent film actress Dorothy Davenport aka Mrs. Wallace Reid.
A movie where a reporter gets a court to order a woman to marry him and then he ends up investigating the murder she's accused of that has a few twists in it deserves to be more interesting than this cheap bland mess. It is interesting to see a mystery like this have so melodrama elements, and it's interesting to credit the director with this, but it could be just a quirk of how the film was made. Pretty much a slog, especially with the rough print I found of it.
