Crime Without Passion Reviews

Loosely based on the career of New York City criminal lawyer William J. Fallon, the great "mouthpiece" of the 1920s, this strange drama was the product of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, with Claude Rains as the suave, ever-confident legal wizard. The film opens with Rains successfully defending a killer by snatching up and drinking "Exhibit A," a vial containing poison, and then having his stomach pumped during a recess. Rains attempts to dump Margo, a jealous honky-tonk singer, for hot blonde Whitney Bourne, but Margo inveigles him into shooting her. Thinking her dead, he prepares an elaborate alibi which involves the killing of another man. Margo survives to haunt him in court, and the real killing is finally laid at his door in a surprise ending. Hecht and MacArthur directed this minor masterpiece and used imaginative techniques in almost every frame. They even appear before the cameras as newsmen interviewing Rains after a legal victory. Fanny Brice and Helen Hayes, MacArthur's wife, appear briefly in a hotel lobby scene. Hayes looks almost directly into the camera which provides a Rains-eye-view as he hurries about establishing an alibi. The opening and closing credits for this film show three female "Furies" darting through the canyons of New York, randomly selecting their victims--those whom they will make mad and upon whom they will visit their evils--a marvelous bit of special effects constructed by Slavko Vorkapich.