Woman Wanted

It just so happens that two movies that I have on my DVR are both on the TCM lineup for the daytime on Friday. Since tomorrow is also Thursday Movie Picks, it means that I'm going to blog about one of the movies tomorrow and the other one today, a good 36-plus hours before its airing. That first movie is Woman Wanted.

Maureen O'Sullivan plays Ann Gray, a woman on trial for murder where the case has just gone to the jury. While waiting for the verdict, through the window her eyes catch those of lawyer Tony Baxter (Joel McCrea), who isn't involved in the case and doesn't recognize her at all, which seems mildly odd since this is apparently a prominent murder trial that would have been in all the papers. Tony pantomimes asking Ann to dinner, although for obvious reasons she's not available.

The jury comes back, and Ann is found... guilty! As she's being remanded into custody, some gangsters deliberately crash into the police car, allowing her the opportunity to escape. She naturally takes it, and winds up running into Baxter outside the entrance to his apartment hotel, so she takes him up on that offer for a meal, following him up to his apartment.

However, there are all sorts of problems, as you can guess with a woman who's a fugitive from justice, even if she insists she's not guilty, and the movie lets us know that this is in fact the case. Ann's picture is in all the papers so certainly somebody will recognize her; sure enough, that happens as the house detective and a policeman come up to Baxter's apartment looking for her. But that's not the only problem as far as Tony's side of the story is concerned. He's got a fiancée of sorts in Betty Randolph (Adrienne Ames), and she recognizes that there's another woman in the apartment, which needless to say displeases her.

As for Ann, her problems are with the gangsters who facilitated her escape. They weren't doing it for altruistic reasons. They know that Ann is not guilty. But the murder involved $250,000 in bonds that have gone missing. The gangsters think that Ann knows something about where those bonds are, and want her to tell them, even though she doesn't know where they are.

With that in mind, Tony and Ann set out and leave the city partly to escape the police, partly to stay one step ahead of the gangsters, led by Smiley (Louis Calhern), and partly to try to prove Ann's innocence. The action shifts fairly quickly to a road-house, then a boat house, and finally to Smiley's nightclub, where Ann seems to be in danger. But we know this is the sort of movie that's going to have a happy ending, even if the Production Code hadn't required the guilty party to get what's coming to him.

Woman Wanted is a perfectly acceptable B movie, surprisingly good in fact considering that it's an MGM movie released at a time (1935) when it was really Warner Bros. that was cranking out the great Bs and programmers like Fog Over Frisco, which came out about a year before Woman Wanted. In Woman Wanted, we have two appealing leads in O'Sullivan and McCrea, and a story that really zips along in its running time of 67 minutes.

Woman Wanted is definitely worth a watch, and is also available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive Collection.