The part of Nora Charles is now being played by Ginger Rogers

I was looking for movies on my DVR that are available on DVD, and one of them is Star of Midnight, which is unsurpisingly available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive.

A brief introductory scene has Tim Winthrop (Leslie Fenton) talking with his girlfriend Alice Markham, with the agreement that they'll meet mid-evening. Cut to a shot of a clock showing a time much later when they were supposed to meet; a phone call to where Alice is supposed to be reveals that she's skipped town to head to New York.

Clay Dalzell (William Powell) is a lawyer in New York who has a young woman chasing him in the form of Donna Mantin (Ginger Rogers). Tim has reason to belive that Alice came to New York, and wants Clay to help find Alice. They do find her, playing the lead actress in a weird show called Midnight, where she's wearing a mask and performing under the name Mary Smith. When Tim calls her Alice, she leaves the stage and disappears, much to everybody's consternation. On leaving the theatre, Clay meets Jerry, an old flame who has been married several times and is now married to Roger (Ralph Morgan).

Meanwhile, Tommy Tennant is a newspaper gossip columnist who has been writing about Clay and Donna in ways that are quite unflattering to Clay. But he also has information on why Alice bolted from the show she was performing in, and he comes over to Clay's apartment to discuss it. However, before he can reveal what he knows, a mysterious hand holding a gun appears, firing the gun and shooting Tennant dead and grazing Clay before throwing the gun down near the two men.

Stupidly, Clay picks up the gun to chase the gunman, leaving his fingerprints all over it such that when the police come, Clay is going to be an obvious suspect. Clay realizes that he's going to have to do an investigation of his own to try to find both Alice and whoever it is that killed Tennant. (We of course already know that Clay is innocent.) Inspector Doremus (J. Farrell MacDonald) is on the case, and one suspect we haven't mentioned yet is shady lawyer Kinland (Paul Kelly).

William Powell investigates a murder, and he and his love interest drink a lot, so Star of Midnight brings up obvious resemblances to The Thin Man. This one was made at RKO as opposed to The Thin Man at MGM. so the whole production looks a little less polished than what we get over at MGM. The story itself is also a little more convoluted and doesn't work the way The Thin Man did, although to be fair the story is only part of the reason you watch a movie like this.

The other main reason is the chemistry between the two leads, and both of them shine here. Ginger Rogers holds her own as much as Myrna Loy did in the Thin Man movies. The movie is pretty much about the two of them even more than other "couples investigate a murder" movies are, as the rest of the characters are surprisingly unmemorable.

Star of Midnight is certainly worth a watch, although this is another of those movies that would be better served being on a four-film box set of the sort that Warner Home Video used to put out in conjunction with TCM.