Fast and Furious (1939)

(On Cable TV, July 2020) I was slightly mistaken in recording this Fast and Furious—I thought I was recording the 1954 Corman film—but it turns out to be a nice little surprise: a husband-and-wife amateur sleuth story very much in the vein of The Thin Man. It turns out to be the last in an MGM trilogy explicitly modelled on the more successful Powell/Loy series, except half-heartedly executed with different lead actors every time. In this instalment, Franchot Tone and Ann Sothern play the bickering couple to good effect, even though you’ll still miss William Powell in the lead. Fast and Furious is notable for having been directed by Busby Berkeley, but it does not have any of the musical numbers for which he’s best known. The resulting murder mystery is a bunch of hooey (even the characters pretty much run the gamut of suspects to exhaustion), the relationship between the characters is merely fine… and yet, it’s fun and short at merely 73 minutes. There are some good comedy moments involving summer in the city, lions in a hotel, an ex-asylum attendant, and a querulous user of in-room services. Plus, the setting being a fantasy upper-class version of the 1930s doesn’t hurt. While the 1930s had several much better films in the same amateur-sleuth genre, Fast and Furious is very satisfying even as a second-tier example of the form.