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Purely Joyful Movie!

Best movie ever!

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

Jewel Robbery (1932)If you haven't seen why Pre-Code films are a riot—and very very well made— watch this one. Here the sassy, sexy, glammed up heist of a jewelry store becomes a game of manners and courtship. Jewels do in fact get stolen, but that's so not the point of the movie. Centerpiece is William Powell, the superstar status still to come with his "Thin Man" and "Godfrey" roles. He's in top form, always a bit peculiar but really lovable and suave because of it. One of a kind.Equal to him is Kay Francis, who is alive on screen like few actresses, and a great foil to Powell's cool. If Powell is still famous, Francis is not, and the reasons are not clear. (She was labeled "Box Office Poison" in a famous 1938 article, but that same piece labeled Joan Crawford and Kate Hepburn as well, both of whom had hardly begun their mature careers.) But Francis is a wonder in her heyday and you may as well start here to get why. (She was for years in the 1930s the highest paid actress bar none.)So if you aren't convinced to see this yet, take the set design, the tightly engineered photography and editing, and the overall direction by William Dieterle, who is an underrated master of the classic Hollywood years. Again, just see this for proof. As for the Code and its effect here, listen to the banter, which is fast and loaded with double entendres. No one skips a beat, and the fast swirl never gets confusing. Really a remarkably packed 70 minutes.

Warner Brothers was bleeding some serious red ink in 1932. The public's once-insatiable talkie curiosity had worn off and the Depression had tightened it's stranglehold on America, causing ticket prices to drop below 1930-31 levels. Against this reality, the studio had actively pursued marginal Broadway plays it rightly thought could be had on the cheap and improved on; Ladislas Fordor's comedy "Ekszerrablás a Váci-uccában" (or "Jewel Robbery"), adapted for the stage by Bertram Bloch. The play had blown through the Booth Theatre after just 54 performances in front of half-filled seats. Purchased for a reported $10,000, the property came in at cost low enough to justify giving it an A-effort. Newly hired screenwriter Erwin S. Gelsey rewrote the play and recent German émigré William Dieterle was enlisted to direct. At this point Warner's was spending about $300,000 on it's A-efforts and was sandbagging it's huge losses (they would continue into 1936) from profits squirreled away from the salad days of 1928-31. Jewel Robbery did nothing to help it's 1932 bottom line. The film flopped miserably (critics cited Kay Francis' interpretation of a morally objectionable philandering Viennese trophy wife). The fact was, there wasn't much Depression era audiences could relate to. Warner's injection of sex and marijuana would doom any hope of eking out re-release profits after the 1934 Production Code kicked in and the property would remain virtually unseen until the inception of TCM. To contemporary audiences, Jewel Robbery is a pre-code hoot. To Jack L. Warner, it was an ulcer.

Kay Francis was never, in my possibly limited experience, so light and charming, even though her character is stupid and immoral.Her speech defect, which I had never noticed before, was very apparent in this role, but seems to have just added another layer of charm.William Powell, as the thief who preferred to be called "robber," was his usual self, which is pretty good.But, all in all, this is a pretty bad movie.The last shot is a regrettable reminder we have been wasting our time on a movie, and the movie as a whole is, indeed, pretty much a waste of time.Stupid and immoral people are too much in the news to be also a source of entertainment.Good directing and pretty good acting do not make up for the absence of any quality in the story.

This film has to be on the short list of films-that-epitomize-pre-code-Hollywood. Adultery, drugs, crime, flaunting of morals and convention, free-spirit thumbing their nose, all done with humour and glamour. One can understand why the church was upset! Problem was that there were many films that played on these themes so it must have seemed that Hollywood was really out to corrupt the world. This one has the full package but with a wink and smoothness that today's garbage film-makers would never have the patience to pull-off. Too bad the code swung the pendulum way too far in the other direction. A must-see for Francis and Powell fans.