A SLIGHT CASE OF MURDER (76)

Directed by: Lloyd Bacon (1938)

Starring: Edward G. Robinson, Ruth Donnelly, Allen Jenkins, Jane Bryan

The Pitch: A gangster's attempts to "go straight" are complicated by four corpses stashed - unbeknownst to him - in the upstairs bedroom of the house where he's throwing a party.

Theo Sez: Case of quality over quantity : just a handful of really big laughs in this famous farce (mostly in the last 20 minutes), but they're deeply satisfying, mostly because characters have been built around them - hardly farce at all, in fact, if that implies clever-but-mechanical things happening to people we don't really care about. It starts off slowly, at least in comedic terms (not in terms of actual pacing, which is the rat-a-tat Warners house-style of the 30s), getting laughs from former henchmen turned into butlers and chefs ("Does Madame and Mademoiselle wish meatballs 'n spaghetti fer dinner?") but also lingering over the exposition as our hero attempts to put his criminal past behind him - showing what's at stake, building a context for the frenetic goings-on of the final section (people rushing in and out, corpses turning up in all the wrong places), just as it makes sense to play the arch, Runyonesque black comedy (featuring characters with names like Little Dutch and No-Nose Cohen) around Robinson's avuncular performance. His ex-bootlegger is a deceptively complex (and funny) creation - his Napoleonic delusions of grandeur (talking about himself in the third person, stamping his name on his cigars), his well-meaning attempts to act the successful businessman, his hilarious streak of sentimentality (he adopts a teenage hoodlum - Dead End Kid Bobby Jordan - and burbles on about seeing "a halo round his little head" when he's sleeping) : you want this silly, soft-hearted, really rather likeable little man to find a way out of the ever-mounting complications, and there's a kind of joy to it when he does - we're not just laughing to applaud a well-oiled comic narrative. It couldn't work today, audiences wouldn't stand for it - one can easily imagine a 90s viewer tuning out after half an hour, muttering that "it's meant to be a comedy and I haven't laughed once" (even sitcoms, which work in a similar character-based way, need to have a glib joke every ten seconds) - yet it really is amazing how well it works : it doesn't exhaust you, the way our comedies often do, leaves you refreshed, like a letter from a dear, witty friend. Slight, but a tonic.