City of Chance

It's a busy night at the gambling house that Donald Woods runs with old-line, genial gambler C. Aubrey Smith. Besides the drunks, the woman who thinks the way to get her husband to stop gambling is to slip some crooked dice and 'discover' them at the table, closing the place down, Eddie Marr, who alternately tries to buy his share from Woods and kill him, and the threat of police raids, Lynn Bari shows up. She knows Woods from when they were both Texans growing up. Now she's a reporter, there to get some stories and cover the raid her paper has arranged in its campaign to shut down gambling.

It's a genial and enjoyable B from Fox's B division, and besides the always-delightful Smith, director Ricardo Cortez has directed a busy movie, full of incidents and people who are naughtier than they should be -- except for Smith and Woods. Cortez was born Jacob Krantz, so of course he became a Latin Lover type when he hit Hollywood. Sound revealed his Lower East Side accent, so he changed his star persona, moved from MGM to Warners, and had a nice career there. By the middle of the 1930s, the demand for someone who could play a hood or Sam Spade was on the downturn, so his acting career started to dry up. In 1939, he started to direct, and turned out some nifty B movies over the next couple of years.

By the middle of the 1940s, he was working on Poverty Row, so he quit the movies and returned to Wall Street, where he prospered, returning to the movies occasionally whenever John Ford wanted him for a role. He died in 1977 at the age of 76, having outwitted them all.