BootDigest Such a frustrating disappointment

UnowPriceless hyped garbage

Acensbart Excellent but underrated film

Spidersecu Don't Believe the Hype

vincentlynch-moonoi I was expecting a treat here. After all, there was Jean Arthur, Joel McCrea, Reginald Owen, and Thomas Mitchell. I was also expecting a comedy. Wrong on both counts. The cast performances here were disappointing, and this is a drama...well...sort of.When she made this film, Jean Arthur had been in the business for 13 years, but she had only recently hit it big with "Mr. Deeds Goes To Town". Far too many of her earlier films were memorable only for their titles (such as "The Mysterious Dr. Fu Manchu"). But, beginning in this year, and for the next 8 years, Arthur was a force to be reckoned with at the box office. Here you see hints of the Arthur to come.Joel McCrea's finest film period began about 3 years after this film, and lasted for 3-4 years until he began concentrating on Westerns...which may have seemed financially wise at the time, but today do not exactly help one's film legacy. McCrea is "okay" here, but if you want to see him at his best, try something like "Foreign Correspondent" or "Palm Beach Story".So, you have each of these actors at something less than their best, and you'll probably be disappointed in both Reginald Owen and Thomas Mitchell (and one is rarely disappointed in Mitchell). And then there's the story line, which is a bit of a stretch. Can anyone really be as intuitive as McCrea is supposed to be in this film? And that is the question that hold the plot together...barely.And so, while I was expecting a treat here, I got a trick. I hung through until the end, although I'm not quite sure why. Ah well, they can't all be winners.

federovsky Odd mix of noir and screwball that works about as well as you would expect. The noir element is obvious from the very opening scenes - this aspect of the film is quite an eye-opener and is apparently an overlooked early example of the genre - though not the earliest: The Thin Man (1934) is the earliest film I am aware of containing the classic noir elements (and also has an ungainly admixture of screwball). Anyway, as remarkable as the noir sections are in Adventure in Manhattan, the whole thing doesn't hang together, which is a great pity. Joel McCrea is a full-of-himself writer-sleuth hired by an irritating news editor - like all news editors, on the edge of a nervous breakdown - to build up the angle on a crime story. They make heavy weather of it. It's leaden and not cute. There's a bizarre scene where they're all eating baked beans in McCrea's bedroom. Jean Arthur is a decent actress but doesn't have the right manner for this, too steely and serious. The wisecracks come out of her mouth and hit the floor. The story is hardly redeemed by the obvious twist - and the script, the characters and the actors barely give us reason to wait for it. I was hoping it would have the good grace to finish up after 65 minutes, but it took 72.

blanche-2 Joel McCrea and Jean Arthur have an "Adventure in Manhattan" in this 1936 film, also starring Thomas Mitchell and Reginald Owen, and directed by Edward Ludwig.McCrea plays a sharp criminal reporter who is convinced that a world-famous thief, believed dead, is actually very much alive and responsible for some big heists that have taken place. He meets Arthur, a young actress, and the two fall in love as McCrea tries to prove his theory.This is a really enjoyable film, with delightful performances by McCrea and Arthur. It's a bit all over the place - part screwball, part mystery. I frankly didn't see much of Nick and Nora Charles in it as others have. But the dialogue is bright, McCrea and Arthur have good chemistry, and some aspects of the mystery are good. McCrea is often thought of as sort of a poor man's Gary Cooper: a handsome, hunky all-American. In westerns there is more of a similarity, with Cooper having more gravitas, but McCrea's lighter touch and more overt personality lent themselves well to comedy. That's where he and Cooper parted company.Enjoyable, and with a better script, it would have been terrific.

bkoganbing After a big success in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town which really established Jean Arthur as the rival in screwball comedy to Carole Lombard, she got cast in some routine films that sought to take advantage of her new image. Adventure in Manhattan was one of them and while it's plot verges on the silly it could have been a lot better, but for some really bad miscasting.The guy who could have brought off the role of the wise cracking crime reporter was over at Warner Brothers. This part James Cagney could have phoned over to Columbia, but in the hands of all American hero Joel McCrea it really looks forced. Some high profile robberies have taken place and crime reporter McCrea thinks and has written that the culprit of all these has been a master criminal along the lines of Professor Moriarty. Problem is that this guy is believed dead by all, but McCrea.McCrea is right and it's revealed early enough in the film to be Reginald Owen who is now in the guise of a theatrical producer. And Jean Arthur is an aspiring young ingénue in the cast of a World War I play he's producing. One of the problems I had with this plot was that Professor Moriarty and many of the master criminals in real life and fiction usually work alone or with as few accomplices as possible. The scheme that Owen has involves a considerable gang and I really can't swallow that somewhere along the line somebody doesn't slip up. Thomas Mitchell in one of his earliest screen roles is McCrea's editor and he's his usual good self. Arthur makes the best of a routine assignment and it took someone like Preston Sturges to bring out the real comedian in Joel McCrea.