Women Are Trouble

MGM has Florence Rice try to crack the newspaper racket while racketeers are trying to regain control of the liquor industry. Unfortunately MGM uses Stu Erwin as one of the leads and I have never enjoyed his low-key aw-shucks delivery, Basically the story is too scattergun for MGM. The trio is completed with Paul Kelly as their women-hating editor who keeps flirting with Florence and wrangling with ex-wife Margaret Irving. Or possibly it's director Errol Taggert, newly graduated from from the ranks of assistant directors and who never got out of MGM's short subjects and lesser features.

Oliver Marsh' high-key photography -- the house standard at MGM -- doesn't add much to the proceedings. In the end, though, most of the blame is due to Michal Fessier's script. His dialog is ill-humored. As Dorothy Parker once noted, "Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words." this movie is only calisthenics.

It's post-Prohibition. Gangster Tim Gleason has moved into the protection racket. He harasses small merchants with help from corrupt officials and a few useful murders. He has the gumption to complain to police Inspector Matson while veteran reporter Matt Casey is in his office. Matson is waiting for a whistleblower. Small town reporter Ruth Nolan is desperate to get a big city newspaper job, but the boss Bill Blaine won't hire another woman after the last one. She decides to investigate on her own.

I don't know anything about Casey, Crime Photographer. I've never heard of this long-running franchise character. I like the sassy girl newbie and the buddy-buddy veteran combination. This seems to be dismissed by most. I can see this duo becoming a fun investigative team although I don't want them coupling. I can do without Bill Blaine getting too involved. It's not high praise, but this is not the worst.

One of the reviews of "Women Are Trouble" mentions never hearing of "Casey Crime Photographer". Perhaps that's because the show was not a movie or TV series. It was a fixture on RADIO and played on and off for the better part of a decade. You can find episodes of it on YouTube, on such "Old Time" radio shows as the Nostalgia Digest Channel.

The movie was entertaining, with a bright performance by Florence Rice. Paul Kelly, future felon, gets off some memorable zingers, and the movie offers a reliable supporting cast. I must confess that I have never understood the appeal of Stuart Erwin. He is competent...but not interesting.

Prohibition may be over but the city's racketeers are still terrorizing liquor dealers with a protection racket. When eager would be reporter Florence Rice is a witness to the murder of a state liquor board inspector that other reporters have written up as an automobile accident she gets her job at Paul Kelly's newspaper in Women Are Trouble.

The trouble they can be is that Rice becomes a romantic football tossed between Kelly and reporter Stu Erwin. That relationship is taken right from The Front Page.

Woman Are Trouble is an interesting product from MGM's B picture unit and stealing the show is Kitty McHugh the feisty wife then widow of murder suspect Raymond Hatton. I wish we saw a lot more of her in this film, she really steals it.

This is an amusing film, glad I got see it this morning.