We’re all here to audition for the same part.
There’s Always A Woman (1938) presents a murder mystery as a race between a man and his wife. Ex Assistant District Attorney Bill Reardon is giving up on the private detective racket, much to his wife Sally’s dismay. Moments after he walks out the door of his office to beg for his old job back, a client walks in on Sally, who represents herself as an employee, ready to take on the new job from the lady in expensive pearls who’s worrying about her husband’s predilections in relation to an old girlfriend.
Soon enough, there’s a body, and it’s up the Reardons, individually, to solve the case. Several twists to the narrative lead us down the paths of passion and avarice, from a particularly well done police interrogation scene to the penthouse of the wealthy and desperate, from getting sloshed while on a very public stakeout to arranging for one’s spouse to be photographed half-naked.
But for all the fun, there’s an undercurrent of domestic violence running through this flick which left us a little uncomfortable. True, no actual swings occur, but, at least in this respect, the film has not aged well. If you’re capable of ignoring that undercurrent, this is all in good fun, with some snappy dialog and a smack upside the head for the cops, but if you can’t, you might want to give this a skip.
