Review of Manhattan Melodrama (1934) by Jay N — 03 Mar 2009

This movie is famous for being the movie gangster John Dilinger saw right before he was killed. (It also won an Academy Award for Best Story, which I guess came before the Best Screenplay Oscars). It certainly lives up to its title as a melodrama, but some solid performances and the tough questions it asks made it a decent movie, as far as I'm concerned.

The story revolves around two East Side kids who lose their families in a riverboat disaster, and then the man who takes them in is killed by police on horseback breaking up a riot. One of them, Jim Wade (William Powell) grows up to be an honest District Attorney, and the other, Edward "Blackie" Gallagher (Clark Gable) becomes a gangster. They manage to stay friends, and both fall for the same woman, Eleanor Packer (Myrna Loy). But circumstances force them all to make some genuinely tough choices with no easy answers.

This was listed as a gangster movie on Netflix, but it's more a drama, with its focus solely on our three main characters, the choices they make and why they make them. There's nothing here that glorifies crime or violence, but it's not a simple "good vs. evil" story either. The characters are complex, and so are the dilemmas they've got to deal with.

Acting-wise, this is old-fashioned acting, and again, somewhat over the top, but I bought it. Gable, Powell, and Loy were believable as the characters they were playing, doing the best job they could with what they had to work with, and that's really what counts in a performance above all else. It was also interesting to see these actors playing against type. I know Powell and Loy from the "Thin Man" movies, a series of detective comedies, all of which I've seen and enjoyed, (although the last was the weakest of the bunch), and Gable is an icon of the Golden Age of Hollywood. None of them were playing roles similar to anything else I've seen them in, and it's always interesting to see stuff like that. That's probably why I rated this movie as highly as I did.

The movie does get preachy at times, and woefully melodramatic at times, so you'd probably need to be a seasoned veteran of movies from this time period to get into it. If you're willing to give it a shot, though, it's worth a rental.