Held for Ransom

Richard Lancaster is kidnapped. The $50,000 ransom is paid, but even though the police are watching, the money disappears and Lancaster isn't released. Suspicion falls on Grant Withers, the victim's wastrel nephew, but the head of the investigation has his doubts. He sends his best woman agent, Blanche Mehaffey, to look into the matter. She crosses paths with Withers in a downtown bar, where he's meeting with a mysterious associate, then again at his country home, where she's posing as a writer looking for local color.

There are a few plot holes in this Grand National Picture.... apparently some stuff was left on the cutting room floor in the failed effort to keep the ambitious studio going through an expensive Jimmy Cagney musical. Nonetheless, Withers is good as always, and Mehaffey, whose next-to-last picture this is, is also good; she had started out as a Ziegfeld dancer, then entered the movies as a WAMPAS Baby Star in 1924, working for Hal Roach in Glen Tryon features and Charley Chase one-reelers. She had quit the movies for a couple of years for voice lessons, came back in 1931, and her career drifted downward, along with her recorded history. She sued Paramount in the late 1940s for not paying her for the television broadcast of a movie she had appeared in, and died in 1968 at the age of 60. The rest, as so often is the case, is silence.

Not this movie, however. It's certainly no classic, but it is lively all the way through and has a great, exciting finish. From a studio that was about to go under, with a leading lady near the end of her undistinguished career, that's not too shabby.