A very grimy but also cheerful entertaining tale of survival in New York during the Depression. Not only is this soaked in the essence of 1932 so much that you can taste it, it's also much better than a lot of pictures from that year both technically in terms of direction and photography and also in acting - the characters feel very natural and believable. This one's a real time machine movie.
Director Nick Grindé isn't one of those famous Hollywood names but he'd had his writing and directing fingers in many pies from Norma Shearer's THE DIVORCEE to Laurel and Hardy's BABES IN TOYLAND. He didn't write this one though, we've got Columbia's top writer, Robert Riskin in charge who is today probably best known as the guy who wrote the Frank Capra films. So the team behind this picture were Columbia's A team and this really shows. The photography is very imaginative; indeed it's quite rare to see such care going into making every single frame look so perfect and interesting in the early thirties. Its story has real empathy and real characters so you are immediately draw into living alongside them and caring about their lives. Its script is fast and clever and importantly also witty enough to keep what could have been a miserable, dour tale light and breezy.
The New York of 1932 depicted in this certainly has appeal galore but it doesn't seem somewhere you'd want to stay. Against this background of hardship and suffering, Jeanie, one of the thousands whom society doesn't want anymore, played with astonishing non-sentimental sensitivity by Helen Chandler gets a lucky break. Even as her life starts to improve she still retains a waif-like innocence that's always evoking sympathy and support from us without being soppy. Possibly it's her "normalness" which meant that she never became a big film star. Unlike the greats such as Garbo, Joan Blondell, Jean Harlow, Norma Shearer, you can't really assign a label to describe Helen Chandler's character - she was just normal. In a film like this or indeed in films made these days, naturalness is expected but back then if you weren't the archetypal good time girl, the ultimate sophisticated lady, the other woman, the bubbly friend then where did you belong? Sadly for Helen, not in a film studio..... but back to this film.... yes, she's great in this role.
It's impossible to watch Mayo Methot in anything without the voice in your head telling you every five minutes that she was Bogart's wife and she wasn't very nice to him. You just can't shut that voice up and it is a bit distracting but you must try because Miss Methot has a very crucial role in this. Again like Helen Chandler, she's very natural and believable but whereas Chandler is the one who is pushed around, Methot is one of those doing the pushing. Thucydides words from over two thousand years ago seem quite apposite for New York in the early thirties: The strong do what they can and the weak do what they must.
