— Steve

There are fewer clunkers in her resume than almost any other actress (or actor) of the period. When Adventure in Manhattan is one of your lesser movies you have to be pretty damn good.

No one played the smart, cynical, but in the long run romantic, modern woman better, and she was always at her best when her character was frustrated, angry, in love, and just a little screwball. In fact I’m not sure there could have been much of a screwball school of films without her. She was the ideal heroine in three of Frank Capra’s best, not to mention her work with George Stevens and Billy Wilder. Arthur is in the same league with Hepburn, Stanwyck, Carol Lombard, and Myrna Loy in the screwball school.

For mystery fans I have to single out The Ex-Mrs, Bradford, a Thin Man style film where she and divorced tec hubby William Powell tackle a murder. It’s only a little behind the Thin Man films in terms of enjoyment and better than some of the later ones.

And Stevens The More the Merrier is one of best screwball films ever made largely thanks to the considerable on screen rapport she had with McCrea and Charles Coburn.

One commenter suggested that McCrea’s role would have been better served by James Cagney. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Whatever success the movie has is due in a big way to McCrea’s low key charm.

As David says, he “could make simple goodness interesting,” and Jean Arthur takes second chair in frilly fare like this to almost no one.

This is a good review! You make ADVENTURE IN MANHATTAN sound like fun.
Edward Ludwig is a forgotten director today. The only Ludwig film seen here is OLD MAN RHYTHM (1935). This is a silly-but-fun musical, about a midddle-aged man who enrolls in his son’s college. Rodney Dangerfield did the same thing years later in BACK TO SCHOOL.

David,
That’s a nice summary of Joel McCrea’s career.

I’ve always wondered how we forgot what a good comic actor McCrea was in films like this, The More the Merrier, Sullivan’s Travels, Palm Beach Story, and even Foreign Correspondent. We think of him mostly in relation to westerns and forget early on he was a good general leading man in a wide mix of films including The Most Dangerous Game and the South Seas adventure Bird of Paradise.

Two films of his worth seeing are Two in a Crowd made just before this one, and The Unseen. The latter the same team that made the classic The Uninvited with Gail Russell again, and Herbert Marshall. The Unseen isn’t anywhere near as good as The Univited, but it does have a screenplay co written by Raymond Chandler (with Hagar Wilde), which makes it at least interesting.

He was also the original Dr. Kildare in Internes Can’t Take Money with Barbara Stanwyck, which had him involved with gangsters and good in Shoot First, a Brit. spy film based on Geoffrey Household’s novel Rough Shoot with a screenplay by Eric Ambler.

Still his best crime film is probably Dead End with McCrea the poor but honest guy who has worked himself almost out of the slums but has to wade back in one last time to save a bunch of kids on the cusp from the charms of gangster Humphrey Bogart. Among other things it was the film that gave us the Dead End kids who eventually morphed into the Bowery Boys.

The Sidney Kingsley play it is based on is grim but William Wyler gives it solid direction and the sets themselves are practically a character. It’s less preachy than it could have been thanks to good performers. Lillian Hellman wrote the screenplay, which suggests at this point in her career there is almost certainly a bit of input from Dashiell Hammett (Raoul Whitfield used to claim he could lift the speeches out of her plays whole cloth that Hammett had written). I can’t testify to that, but even her biggest fans grant Hammett wrote one of the major speeches in Watch on the Rhine, so it is possible. I’d find it hard to believe she didn’t at least run a screenplay on this subject past him.

Anyway, McCrea is good in it in the unappealing role (for an actor) of the good decent guy. To give him his due he was one of the actors who could make simple goodness interesting. To see him at his best playing the good guy who is never dull catch one of his best later films Stars in My Crown — the scene at the beginning when he holds religious services in the saloon at the point of his guns is worth catching even if the film wasn’t a charmer from Jacques Tourneur and didn’t feature a pre Gunsmoke James Arness and Amanda Blake in the cast.