Mr. Kenny Williams (Melvyn Douglas) is good at his job, too good in fact. This makes his contributions to the homicide department invaluable, especially the head of the department, Captain McGovern (Clarence Kolb), who insists his men put the department and their duties first. This puts Kenny in conflict with his girl, Maxine Carroll (Joan Blondell), secretary to the mayor. She is getting frustrated that Kenny is constantly having to break off dates with her in order to perform his duties as a detective. This is the basic setup for a screwball comedy that plays more like a couple of episodes from a series than it does a film.
This comes from how the film is structured. There are two distinct stories back to back with only the narrative of Kenny and Maxine’s on-again-off-again relationship as the throughline. The first of these is the funnier of the two with Kenny being forced to take on an assignment dressed in drag, an assignment suggested to the Mayor by Maxine in hopes that his pride will get in the way and he will quit the force. The second involves an enigmatic bank robbery in which Kenny arrests a man only to realize he has the wrong culprit and has to go on the lam to corner the real guilty party. Both halves have their share of comedic moments, but the humor is stronger in the first half, especially the drag sequences and a particularly memorable sequence later in the hospital where Maxine is trying her best to convince Kenny that she is dying.
The second half of the film isn’t quite as good, but Douglas and Blondell still manage to carry it through a few lulls with their tremendous on-screen chemistry. Things liven up again as it approaches the finale, though the film doesn’t give enough time to the wrap-up. It makes this second mystery just as inconsequential as the first one. All of this is building up to a final joke where Captain McGovern plays a prank on Kenny that feels like the ending to a sitcom episode. None of this is a complaint; it’s par for the course for a screwball comedy. Still, it could have used more of a throughline to make this feel more like a film and less like one of those compilations they used to make for theaters, taking several episodes from a popular show and editing them into a feature-length movie. 1939 - 80 minutes
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