Cagney is a double crossing rat trying to leave the country. Blondel a quietly sad working girl looking to get out by marrying a kind Portuguese fisherman.
Their old lives and selves pull at them and it’s always a case of just how hurt by it all they will be.
It’s a fairly standard melodrama most of the way but Cagney’s intro and his scenes with blondel are excellent. She does her top drawer thing, been hurt. Defensive about being…
Nicely anarchic with a proper satirical tone to it. You can’t really go wrong with these.
I guess I'm just going to watch this every few years for the rest of my life and keep finding different things to enjoy in it. This time it was finding Leiutenant Doyle more hilarious than usual and admiring everything Kelly brought to it.
Oh and the construction, the way the events in the other apartments are used to divert Stewart (and of course us) at key moments or to have him on the phone about lonelyhearts so he can talk straight to the police, a perfectly plotted movie.
But everything else was great too, is there a film Thelma Ritter doesn't elevate?
My opportunities for watching films are often quite limited, and often coincide with looking after my daughter and I have hundreds of films here to watch. So I tend to go for fairly short films and fit a few into my film watching days. Which means films like this, which I was always sure I would love, tend to sit unwatched for years at a time.
Which is a shame, as the long run time that makes me opt to…
