Fri 30 Aug 2019

REVIEWED BY WALTER ALBERT:

THERE’S THAT WOMAN AGAIN. Columbia, 1939. Melvyn Douglas, Virginia Bruce, Margaret Lindsay, Stanley Ridges. Director: Alexander Hall. Shown at Cinevent 27, Columbus OH, 1995.

   A followup to last year’s showing of There’s Always a Woman [reviewed by Steve here ], with Virginia Bruce replacing Joan Blondell as Sally Reardon, wife and would-be colleague of her husband Bill (melvyn Douglas) in his detective agency.

   Bruce, as far as I’m concerned, almost makes this unwatchable. She plays a ditzy blonde, with no compensating charm or cuteness. The mystery [concerning a series of robberies from a local jewelry store] is marginally interesting, but Bruce killed off any pleasure I might have taken in it.

— Reprinted from Walter’s Place #108, July 1995.

 

3 Responses to “A PI Movie Review by Walter Albert: THERE’S THAT WOMAN AGAIN (1939).”

1. David Vineyard Says:
   August 30th, 2019 at 7:38 pm

   It lacks the zip the Blondell/Douglas teaming gave it. Bruce is generally quite good in comedy, but she seems out of step with the plot here, hardly the match for Douglas Blondell was. Where Blondell was smart and funny and fast thinking Bruce in this one just seems in a bad mood.

2. Steve Says:
   August 30th, 2019 at 11:03 pm

   Even though I said in my review of the first film that I’d obtained a copy of this the second one, I’ve somehow never gotten around to watching it.

   So instead of posting a comment on a movie I’ve never seen, I thought I’d find out what Frank Nugent, the contemporaneous reviewer for the New York Times, had to say about it:

   “… [That woman] first was Joan Blondell; now she’s Virginia Bruce, whimsical as can be as the wife of that whimsical private detective Bill Reardon, who is hired to solve some whimsical jewel thefts and find the whimsical murderer of a presumably whimsical merchant.”

   […]

   “That much said, there still remains room for a few sour objections to a whimsical veneer, polished, over a crudely jointed mystery film. None of ‘There’s That Woman Again’ stands analysis.”

   https://www.nytimes.com/1939/01/06/archives/the-screen-the-music-halls-theres-that-woman-again-offers-further-a.html

   This must be a hard film to find. There is only one other link to an external review on IMDb, and that’s to Walter’s.

3. David Vineyard Says:
   August 31st, 2019 at 8:02 pm

   It’s available on YouTube with the first one.

Leave a Reply