Load of rubbish!!

A waste of 90 minutes of my life

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

. . . makes a nice companion piece to KIDNAPPING MR. HEINEKEN, which I saw a couple weeks ago. In A SLIGHT CASE OF MURDER, Edward G. Robinson's "Gold Velvet Beer" tastes almost as bad as Heineken's. Unlike his Dutch counterpart, Robinson's "Remy Marco" character realizes that brewers of cheap, yucky, vomit-inducing beer require the priciest bodyguards money can buy IF they wish to walk around as free men. When a gang of five lies in wait for Remy, all of them get shot (and four of them die). When a gang of five kidnaps Mr. Heineken for weeks on end, no one gets shot. As Remy says, "Drink Gold Velvet--it's the tops!" Pabst has the Blue Ribbon, and Budweiser is the King of Beers. (Plus, you don't want to mess around with people surrounded by Clydesdales!) It's all enough to make Heineken green with envy.

That great theme of Damon Runyan: Society mixing it up with those who aren't exactly high class. Again, we see this theme in "A Slight Case of Murder."Edward G. Robinson and Ruth Donnelly are fabulous here as husband and wife trying to go straight with the end of prohibition. With it all, you can't take the past from them, no matter how much you try.Four years after going straight, Robinson's brewery has hit rock bottom. Nobody wants to tell the boss that the beer he serves is absolutely terrible.Robinson goes back to the orphanage he grew up in to take the worst child for a month in his summer place. Watch for Margaret Hamilton, one year before her witchcraft in the memorable "Wizard of Oz."As for this film, it has everything, mistaken identity, associates of Robinson, who are a riot by themselves, a wayward brat who proves his mettle, their wonderful daughter engaged to a police officer, his snobbish father caught up in all the mayhem.

This movie falls securely into the beat-it-you-mugs style of lovable gangster films, fairly common in the '30s. The dialog is rife with all that faux street-tough lingo (ex., "Say, when do we tie on the feedbag?" for When do we eat?), made famous by the Dead End Kids and countless others. I happen to think it's pretty hilarious, but that's just me.This is also a "screwball comedy." Now if you'eve ever wondered about what makes a comedy "screwball," well, the key might be a storyline that disdains all the pedestrian limits imposed by a too rigid attention to the realistic and believable. In other words, to borrow a famous example, Laurel and Hardy, say, are carrying a piano across a rope bridge over a raging river. Half way across, they meet a gorilla. You get the idea.Anyway, I saw this movie when I was a teenager and thought it was one of the best of its era. Seeing it now, I still like it a lot, although it's perhaps not top-shelf. If Frank Capra had made this, the secondary storyline (gangster's daughter wants to marry a policeman!) would have been primary, and the primary storyline (gangster bootlegger, now that Prohibition is over, decides to try to be a "legit" businessman) would have been secondary, and it would have been a better movie (provided of course you had Jean Arthur and James Stewart in the roles of the young lovers). But really, there's a lot to like here.

A Slight Case of Murder had its origins on the Broadway stage where this play by Damon Runyon and Howard Lindsay flopped miserably with only 69 performances in the 1935 season. It certainly adapted better for the screen when Warner Brothers bought it for one of their gangster stable, in this case Edward G. Robinson.The story concerns a gangster Remy Marko who is trying to go straight and get out of the bootleg beer racket now that Prohibition has been repealed. It was a problem faced by any number of people who were not Lucky Luciano or Meyer Lansky.In Robinson's case he's decided to go legitimate and brew beer legally. Of course no one has the heart to tell him that the stuff he's been peddling for years has been nothing but swill, not even his family, Ruth Donnelly and Jane Bryan, nor his closest associates Allen Jenkins, Harold Huber, and Ed Brophy. While all this is going Robinson and the family and friends go to his summer home near the Saratoga racetrack where a big robbery of the bookie's money has taken place. This was in the days before the para-mutual machines and track bets were taken at the sight by legal bookmakers. The gang decides to hide out in what they think will be Robinson's deserted home.Daughter Jane Bryan is romancing state trooper Willard Parker, a prospect the going straight Robinson still finds appalling. No less so than Paul Harvey, Parker's nervous blue-blood father. All these elements mix well for a very funny screen comedy. Robinson who was really getting tired of all the gangster parts, seems to be enjoying himself, referring to himself constantly in the third person, and earning quite a few laughs and keeping up with some of the best scene stealers around. Ruth Donnelly keeps up very well who most of the time remembers she's now supposed to be respectable, but every so often slips back to her familiar background.The guy who really is funny here is Paul Harvey. He's mixing with people he's not used to and it's putting quite an evident strain on him. One of the running gags in A Slight Case of Murder is how bad the beer Robinson makes. He never drinks himself so he doesn't know and no one is brave enough to tell him. Damon Runyon who probably sampled every kind of illegal liquor available during Prohibition, knew well the kind of rot gut that was peddled. The classier places imported stuff from across the border, but the dives used whatever they could get. Marko's lousy beer was something drinking people during Prohibition knew well from. A Slight Case of Murder is one of the few films that ever dealt with that fact albeit in a comic way.Though the plot situations are certainly dated, the talent of this very good cast is timeless.