Manhattan Melodrama

With Manhattan Melodrama, MGM set out to show that anything Warner Bros. could do, they could do better – or at least bigger. It’s that favorite old chestnut the two boyhood friends, one who follows the law, the other a life of crime, with twice-orphaned (in the space of only the opening reel!) Mickey Rooney and Jimmy Butler growing into Clark Gable’s illegal gambling den proprietor and William Powell’s District attorney, with Myrna Loy transferring her affections from one to the other until the inevitable moment when Powell finds himself prosecuting Gable for murder and demanding the death penalty…

Even in 1934 the plot was hokey, but MGM throw everything they have at it in a lavish production that kicks off with a convincingly chaotic recreation of the catastrophic 1904 fire on the pleasure boat General Slocum and just keeps on throwing money at the screen, for the most part pretty effectively. While it’s not on the level of Warners’ later Angels with Dirty Faces, with which it shares two protagonists whose friendship endures all the way to Death Row, it is an entertaining enough hour-and-a-half even if it’s not worth getting yourself shot to death by the FBI on the way out of the movie theater, as famously happened to John Dillinger, giving the MGM publicity department decades of free publicity in the process. On a happier note, after the film came out Lorenz Hart had the idea of writing new lyrics for the song heard in the Cotton Club sequence, The Bad in Every Man,…

An excellent restoration and pretty good story.

Gable's crooked nobility was a bit hard to take but he gave it a good try.

The Roaring 20's does this kind of story much better but then WB were better at these gangster vehicles and they had Cagney et al with the great but under appreciated Raoul Walsh directing.

Perhaps best known as the film Dillinger watched prior to his death, Manhattan Melodrama is an engaging drama typical of the era, with childhood friends heading off on very different career paths, only for an eventual reckoning of sorts. What sets it apart is the incredible star power - after all, the presence of Clark Gable, William Powell and Myrna Loy is going to elevate anything. Fantastic restoration as always.