PAUL MUNI with dark make-up and an Hispanic accent is a hot-blooded Mexican lawyer who turns to a different sort of life when his career as a lawyer leads nowhere. He works for EUGENE Palette in a gambling joint and is soon the jovial man's partner. On the sidelines watching him is BETTE DAVIS, in one of her early femme fatale roles, a bleached blonde whose advances toward Muni are promptly rebuffed.
A sub-plot involving Muni's romance with a society girl (MARGARET LINDSEY) is really rather predictable, especially when she flirts with him from the start and then turns on him when he becomes serious, flinging words at him like "savage" and "brute" and telling him to stay with "his own tribe." The script resolves this ill-fated affair in an abrupt manner before the fade-out.
The highlight of the drama is Bette Davis turning on Muni too, on the stand, declaring that he conspired with her to kill her husband, when in fact she is the guilty one. She goes to pieces on the stand, allowing us a Bette Davis moment that was an indication of the kind of actress she was on the verge of becoming.
Frankly, this whole story bears a strong relationship to another tale Warners produced in '41 with Ida Lupino as the stressed out woman filled with guilt over the murder of her husband. Lupino was even more impressive in her mad moment than Davis. In fact, the whole picture was smoother and produced with more polish than this similar version using some of the same story elements.
Summing up: Intense drama suffers from Muni's overacting as the Mexican lawyer and a script that doesn't develop the wife's character sufficiently to lead to her mental breakdown. A better version is THEY DRIVE BY NIGHT ('41)with George Raft and Ida Lupino and Alan Hale as the hubby she wants to get rid of.
A sub-plot involving Muni's romance with a society girl (MARGARET LINDSEY) is really rather predictable, especially when she flirts with him from the start and then turns on him when he becomes serious, flinging words at him like "savage" and "brute" and telling him to stay with "his own tribe." The script resolves this ill-fated affair in an abrupt manner before the fade-out.
The highlight of the drama is Bette Davis turning on Muni too, on the stand, declaring that he conspired with her to kill her husband, when in fact she is the guilty one. She goes to pieces on the stand, allowing us a Bette Davis moment that was an indication of the kind of actress she was on the verge of becoming.
Frankly, this whole story bears a strong relationship to another tale Warners produced in '41 with Ida Lupino as the stressed out woman filled with guilt over the murder of her husband. Lupino was even more impressive in her mad moment than Davis. In fact, the whole picture was smoother and produced with more polish than this similar version using some of the same story elements.
Summing up: Intense drama suffers from Muni's overacting as the Mexican lawyer and a script that doesn't develop the wife's character sufficiently to lead to her mental breakdown. A better version is THEY DRIVE BY NIGHT ('41)with George Raft and Ida Lupino and Alan Hale as the hubby she wants to get rid of.