Fog Over Frisco

Bette Davis is the wild daughter of Arthur Byron, and her half-sister, Margaret Lindsay and she adore each other. When her picture appears on the paper's front page, daddy lays down the law. After she noodges fiancee Lyle Talbot into passing more stolen bonds -- the proceeds of which mysteriously vanish -- she disappears from the family's Nob Hill mansion, leaving the entire city running around like mad trying to find her.

There's a lot to enjoy in this Warners B during their high-speed dialogue period. Miss Lindsay sums up the solution speaking as fast as Glenda Farrell, Miss Davis gets one of her best entrances, Hugh Herbert gets a key role in which he's funny and not an absolute idiot, Alan Hale has a disappearing Irish accent, and the story has a tremendous number of red herrings packed into its 68 minutes. It's a bit unusual in having no clear point-of-view character; perhaps that's a foreshadowing of the cynical Universal soapers that William Diertele would direct at Universal in the 1950s. It's minor, very minor, but it was key to Miss Davis' career. Apparently she didn't fight her bosses to get out of this part because she wanted the loan-out for OF HUMAN BONDAGE and worked very well with Dieterle.