Review of Manhattan Melodrama (1934) by Tiffany D — 07 Aug 2013

Will always be remembered as the flick Dillinger saw the night he was shot and killed. It deserves another look though. It does include some features that are worth remembering for posterity. Rodgers's and Hart's tune Blue Moon, here with different lyrics identifying it as The Bad in Every Man, is sung in The Cotton Club and later is played in the background of the prison scene.

A thirteen-year-old Mickey Rooney plays the younger version of Clark Gable's character. Several leisure activities of the early 20's are shown, such as going to boxing matches, horse races, and hockey games.

Spud (Pendleton) and Annabelle (Jewell) are a comic couple as a lunkhead bruiser and ditzy moll. The characters are all easily recognized types, but they are entertainingly used to tell the story. I love the way dialog sounds in these movies of the 1930's.

The leads, Gable, Loy, and Powell deliver lots of witty repartee. We start in 1904 on New York's Eastside on a big wheel paddle-boat. Blackie (Rooney) is always looking to have fun, win bets, and protect smaller kids from big bullies.

Jim (Butler) is studious and cautious, yet will join his friend Blackie in fighting off bullies. A fluke tragedy strikes and we see the first instance of melodrama with the boys crying as they become orphans.

Sixteen years later in 1920, Blackie (Gable) owns a speakeasy gambling joint and Jim (Powell) has earned a law degree. Blackie is still endlessly lucky and crime seems to have paid for him. Jim is about to be elected District Attorney, and a couple years later he'll become New York's Governor.

They maintain their friendship until Blackie's crooked ways make it impossible for Jim to look the other way. Myrna Loy as Eleanor starts as Blackie's flame, but once she meets the impossibly principled Jim, she gives up the riches and good times Blackie offered her for the domestic life of a political figure's wife.

Courtesy of the Hays Code the ending and in fact many of the scenes seem to be playing it incredibly safe. It doesn't feel real that Blackie and Jim sustain such charismatic class as, respectively, a sacrificial lamb and an unimpeachable upholder of the law.

The movie does do a lot of things right though.