Public Enemy's Wife

Undoubtedly attempting to capitalize on their Cagney-starring Public Enemy success five years earlier, Warner Brothers takes the woman’s perspective in Nick Grindé’s Public Enemy’s Wife, in which a gangster escapes from prison to prevent his former wife, also an ex-con, from re-marrying (“When you start looking for a new guy, make sure you find one who’s bulletproof”). As he so often does, Cesar Romero steals the show as the jealous, explosive Gene Maroc, who, after reading of his ex-wife’s pending nuptials in the newspaper, escapes while being transported to testify in court (the flight sequence using a little old lady and a soporific gas in a train car is one of the film’s highlights). When he finally catches up with his ex, Judith (Margaret Lindsay), she’s changed her name, dyed her hair, and moved to Palm Beach, where she’s about to marry wealthy playboy Thomas Duncan McKay (Dick Foran); Maroc will thwart this effort through kidnapping and other means. Pat O’Brien plays Lee Laird, an agent with the newly named FBI assigned to catch Maroc, which involves pretending to be a drunken fisherman to access Maroc’s hideaway and, later, a silly plot twist that steers a portion of the film into screwball comedy territory, ripping off a narrative device from the hugely successful zenith of screwball, It Happened One Night (1934). The film is certainly not a must-see, but for noir fans, it holds interest as an example of the crime film’s evolution in the late 30’s away from gangster tropes and into noir melodrama, a period during which a criminal old lady was probably shocking but unambiguously happy endings were still the norm.