With certain echoes of It Happened One Night, on the run private investigator James Stewart bumps into kookie poetess Claudette Colbert ("I swear by my eyes") and tries to prove a condemned man innocent, pursued by colleague Guy Kibbee and dumb cop Nat Pendleton. Good fun, but perhaps limited in availability due to two politically incorrect but somehow even funnier moments: Stewart in dark face makeup doing black impression, then he slugging Colbert unconscious!
Written by the ubiquitous Ben Hecht, with Herman Mankiewicz ("It lacked a story", one bright Amazon reviewer wrote!), photographed by Oliver T Marsh at MGM.
It reminded me several times of that Droopy cartoon* where no matter how far the criminal flees, Droopy is always there ahead of him.
A bit of a golden era for Stewart - after this he made Mr Smith Goes to Washington, Destry Rides Again, The Shop Around the Corner, The Mortal Storm, The Philadelphia Story and Come Live with Me (before then going off to fly bombing missions in WW2. As a great piece of trivia, in his eventual capacity as Colonel, he presided over the trial of two airmen who had accidentally bombed Zurich!)
* 'Dumb Hounded', the actual first Droopy cartoon, Tex Avery, 1943.
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