One of the best lines in the movie: Louise Brooks, with her signature do and a voice that sounds like a yelping Chihuahua, calls up a newspaper editor and announces that she's going to marry the scion of a prominent family. "Well, well, may I send you my congratulations." Brooks: "You bet you can -- and send them from Tiffany's." (PS: Kids, Tiffany's is a very expensive jewelry store and also the name of the family that owns every diamond mine in Africa, not that the last observation matters here.) Brooks is the "canary", a sluttish nightclub performer who has her hooks into young Spottwoode and intends to marry him and improve her social station. Old Spottswoode objects, of course, but Brooks threatens to tell the press that Young Spottswoode has embezzled money from his old man's bank.
She's been around and has something against everyone, the kind of woman you wouldn't want to get to know. Well, maybe you would, but you should never permit her to get to know YOU. So she's extorting old Spottswoode. She's also extorting the newspaper editor. She's extorting others. And every extortee wishes her grievous harm.
"Listen, baby, a little thing like a divorce don't mean nothing to me. I just heard you taking those suckers down over the phone." That's Brooks' husband or ex husband, recently released from the Crowbar Hotel. "Say, I oughtta bump you off." This woman makes enemies of everyone.
Of course, somebody offs her mysteriously in her flat. It's at this point, twenty minutes into the movie, that we discover that William Powell is Philo Vance, detective. He and the police work together to solve the canary's murder.
The police act as if mentally hobbled. Somehow their suspicions fall largely on young Spottswoode and his girl friend Alice. It's odd because the two of them have been together before and after the canary's murder. Jean Arthur is a brunette Alice and has the same curiously appealing nasal voice that she would have ten years later, but not yet the acting chops. She shows up only for a few seconds.
The movie is strictly routine. Powell has his usual clipped pronunciation, but nobody else brings much to their roles. The direction is terrible. Dynasties rise and fall, Eons come and go, while actors stand looking at one another in silence. And the plot isn't really worth carrying on about.
Powell was enchanting in the Thin Man series. Here, he's just another sober sleuth, putting together the jigsaw pieces of a puzzling crime.
She's been around and has something against everyone, the kind of woman you wouldn't want to get to know. Well, maybe you would, but you should never permit her to get to know YOU. So she's extorting old Spottswoode. She's also extorting the newspaper editor. She's extorting others. And every extortee wishes her grievous harm.
"Listen, baby, a little thing like a divorce don't mean nothing to me. I just heard you taking those suckers down over the phone." That's Brooks' husband or ex husband, recently released from the Crowbar Hotel. "Say, I oughtta bump you off." This woman makes enemies of everyone.
Of course, somebody offs her mysteriously in her flat. It's at this point, twenty minutes into the movie, that we discover that William Powell is Philo Vance, detective. He and the police work together to solve the canary's murder.
The police act as if mentally hobbled. Somehow their suspicions fall largely on young Spottswoode and his girl friend Alice. It's odd because the two of them have been together before and after the canary's murder. Jean Arthur is a brunette Alice and has the same curiously appealing nasal voice that she would have ten years later, but not yet the acting chops. She shows up only for a few seconds.
The movie is strictly routine. Powell has his usual clipped pronunciation, but nobody else brings much to their roles. The direction is terrible. Dynasties rise and fall, Eons come and go, while actors stand looking at one another in silence. And the plot isn't really worth carrying on about.
Powell was enchanting in the Thin Man series. Here, he's just another sober sleuth, putting together the jigsaw pieces of a puzzling crime.