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Quotidian drudgery and its shadow, later taken up by Kurosawa (Ikiru). A broken alarm clock is all it takes to end eight years of punctuality, the clerk (Edward G. Robinson) is tardy at the office and trembles before his boss, the cheeky colleague (Jean Arthur) strolls in with a contrasting attitude: "Late? What for, something happened?" He's a meek soul with literary aspirations, with Cymbeline in his typewriter and a pair of erudite pets, Abelard the cat and Heloise the canary. The joke is that he's the spitting image of Public Enemy Number One, the gangster on the lam. ("My idea of a boyfriend," sighs the muse.) John Ford quite at home with Capra's writers and leading lady and urban bustle, with a shared theme of media doubletalk. The newspaper's description of the criminal has the protagonist contemplating a distorted mirror, after a police mix-up he's offered his own column—he zigzags home full of liquid courage, only to find the underworld mug waiting for him. Apologetic stammer and sadistic sneer are the halves of Robinson's tour de force, the Arthur croak is another ingenious sound: "Just groooowl at him, killer!" Not Ford's leisurely pastoral communes but a hectic grid with cops as truculent as hoodlums, its screwball comedy perpetually abutting on nightmare, a matter of split-screens. Pagnol's Topaze one moment, the next a sinister view of the outlaw in disguise zeroing in on a doomed associate in the prison yard. The pushover seizes a Tommy-gun at last and promptly faints, "it's more humane this way." Ford has all of this on a different register that same year in The Informer. With Arthur Hohl, James Donlan, Arthur Byron, Wallace Ford, Donald Meek, Etienne Girardot, Edward Brophy, Paul Harvey, and J. Farrell MacDonald. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |