What a weird amalgam! Sort of a screwball version of Fritz Lang’s Fury, mixing lynch mobs with romantic comedy. And what an odd pairing of Cary Grant and Ronald Colman as well, two Englishman supposedly representing antithetical New England types. And then the strange triangle in which they vie to give up Jean Arthur to each other. None of it believable for a minute, but with these three performers the nonsense hardly matters, and George Stevens is enough of a craftsman as director to give the proceedings some surface plausibility. Grant is a milltown anarchist (Leopold Dilg, if you can imagine -- well no, you can’t) falsely accused of arson and murder; Colman is the aloof and prematurely aged law professor destined for the Supreme Court. Through the agency of the appealing Ms. Arthur, the escaped fugitive winds up in the attic of the lawyer, and through debate on the philosophical basis of the law (I kid you not!), they become friends and both the better for it. Bizarre but enjoyable. Would certainly be fodder for any cultural psychoanalysis of American society in that era -- check out Colman’s relationship with his “man Tilney,” actor Rex Ingram. *6* (1942, dvd, n.)
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