Hollywood recycled this story several times in the 1930s because it’s a perfect set-up for a crime yarn as a heavy-handed morality tale. It’s that old saw about the two close childhood friends who grow up to take very different paths. One walks the straight road so staunchly that he becomes a district attorney or a priest, while the other becomes a gangster who will shoot a guy in the face himself over a debt. When these two reunite as adults, they love each other all over again. They could talk for days. When they both figure out who the other one is though, things gets a little complicated. The best way to tell this story on film is to cast two equal powerhouse personalities in the opposing roles, and the best thing about this movie is that it understands that. An imposing, screen-owning Clark Gable is the gangster; an intelligent, luminously charismatic William Powell is the lawman. The twist: It’s the gangster who ends up making the most difficult choice.
I vote for 1938’s Angels With Dirty Faces as the best film in this mold. Manhattan Melodrama is on the stiff side by comparison. Its characters feel more like paper dolls, manipulated to prove a point, than flesh and blood. The film further slides down in modern-day evaluation because it fails to the see the chemistry between William Powell and Myrna Loy. They’re among the greatest comic couples of the time, consistently sarcastic and smart and volleying back and forth brilliantly, but in this, their first film together, they’re downright awkward.
Blame it on the director, W.S. Van Dyke, I say. “One-shot Woody” was famous for delivering films faster than Domino’s Pizza at the time. He hammered these fuckers out, ahead of schedule and under-budget, but still neatly manicured for the movie palaces of old. Van Dyke could hit the big notes, but he had trouble with the subtle ones sometimes. That didn’t stop him from making massive hits in his day, but it does stop some of those hits from aging very well. I submit Manhattan Melodrama as one of those classics that falls apart in your hands in later years (though, to be fair, Van Dyke soon after directed Powell and Loy in The Thin Man, the breezy and funny murder mystery that cemented their onscreen partnership, so old “One-shot Woody” sometimes did good).
You see this movie today as a curiosity. AND as a piece of real-life American crime history. EVERY review of this movie has to mention the big piece of trivia attached to it. It’s the law. So, I’ll do it, too. Manhattan Melodrama is the film that infamous American criminal Jeffrey Dahmer saw before the police caught up to him and gunned him down in the streets of Chicago many years ago. Take that to your office water cooler tomorrow and impress all of your friends.