Best movie of this year hands down!

Good movie but grossly overrated

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

Wow - how beautiful Lila Lee looked, photographed to perfection by Benjamin H. Kline in fetching period costumes and stylistically filmed in slanting shadows. She plays Helen, starry eyed wife of carnival manager Buck Rankin (Jack Holt) whose honeymoon is over before it begins when he is sentenced to 20 years for killing a man in a side show brawl.Jack Holt was Columbia's most bankable male star and by the early 30s seemed to be in every other movie - usually playing in adventurous thrillers but this one was a hearts and flowers tear-jerker that still left room for some action. Desperate for Helen to get on with her life, he forges a letter from the prison governor in which he announces his own death - jumping into the whirlpool of water that no prisoner has ever survived, all the while serving out his sentence.Twenty years after shows him now free and with the help of his buddy (Allan Jenkins) has him going from strength to strength as a racketeer. He is all set to give evidence at a trial of one of his associates when Sandy enters the scene. Sandy is an eager reporter but also Rankin's daughter who recognizes him at once due to his picture always being prominent on her mother's dressing table. Although remarried she has never forgotten her first love!! Jean Arthur is just splendid as Sandy, never cloying or sentimental or full of recriminations for the past - she is just eager to spend as much time as she can with her dad. There is also a young man played by the moody Don Cook who, of course, jumps to the wrong conclusion when he sees them together!!Having started in movies back in 1923, by 1932 Jean Arthur realized she would need to go to Broadway if she wanted to be anything more than just an ingénue. She did and came back to Hollywood with a Columbia contract. As well as going blonde, she had emerged as a better actress and as Sandy she lights up the screen and along with Lila Lee, the real reason "Whirlpool" is such a success!!Very Recommended.

A Roy William Neill's movie, with the exception of Sherlock Holmes series, are hard to find, especially the silent ones, mostly lost, unfortunately. This Columbia Pictures film is rare too. But the scheme is very familiar to me, where a father meets his lost daughter twenty years later, after he was separated from her mother, after he was in jail. This scheme has been seen a couple of times before, all in thirties features. I don't remember the titles. And we did not see such topics anymore a decade later. This scheme seemed to be made only in the thirties. A melodrama mixed up a little with some noir accents.An interesting gem.

Jack Holt is OK in this film but Jean Arthur saves it. The plot is unbelievable, but is noteworthy since it was Arthur's first film for Columbia after her return to Hollywood from the New York stage. Her previous films at Universal were forgettable. According to her biography, it was when executives saw the daily rushes, that they offered her a long term contract.This movie is also notable in that Frank Capra reviewed her scenes and decided to offer her the part as Babe Bennett in the now classic Mr. Deeds Goes To Town. You can understand why he picked her. It was the beginning of a successful film period, which lasted 20 more years.It is also interesting and funny to see Allen Jenkins, in a typical side kick role, particularly when he is doing knee bends in front of a window in his underwear.

Jack Holt is great in this rather ornately written melodrama. He plays a man sentenced to prison for twenty years, whose pregnant wife refuses to divorce him. He sends her a letter that he has committed suicide in a way that leaves no corpse. We then fast forward twenty-five years. Jack is now a reclusive night-club owner and his daughter is Jean Arthur, a newspaperwoman who figures out who he is. In order to protect her mother, who has remarried, from public scandal, Holt has to disappear again.The rest of the movie is about the complications surrounding the latter events and Jack Holt gives a better performance than I have ever seen him give, enormously underplayed by his usual standards. Jean Arthur has to contend with some lines that have not aged well, as does juvenile Donald Cook.Nonetheless, throughout all this, the performances as as good as they can get under old hand Roy William Neill. Like many silent directors, Neill had retreated to the Bs -- although this is definitely an A picture from Columbia. Even so, Neill always worked well and carefully and this is a fine effort, the visuals perfect under a crack team of three cinematographers and half a dozen camera operators that included Joe August and Ben Kline.In short, while the dialogue may occasionally make you roll your eyes, everything else about this movie will keep you intensely interested.