Plantiana Yawn. Poorly Filmed Snooze Fest.

Fluentiama Perfect cast and a good story

FeistyUpper If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

CrawlerChunky In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

blanche-2 This very fun film starring James Cagney and Bette Davis really had me wondering about the person behind Ms. Davis' dialogue. I'll get to that later.Cagney plays Corrigan, a so-called "genealogist" who is in reality a con man. Of course he looks and acts like one, too. He and his group, which includes Allen Jenkins, try to bilk people out of their inheritances. Across the way is Wallingham (Alan Dinehart). He's a genealogist, too, in a very fancy office. He's immaculately dressed, and an immaculate, formal staff go from person to person offering them tea and magazines. As one can imagine, when Jimmy visits the office, he's impressed and wants an office just like that. His old secretary, Joan (Davis) works there now, but for ten months she worked for Corrigan. She thinks Wallingham has ethics.The plot concerns a woman found dead from poisoning. Homeless and hungry, she ate a partially eaten hamburger bun out of garbage but had no way of knowing the original recipient had been poisoned with it.Everyone laments her fate until they get a load of her coat. It is double-lined with bonds, jewels, gold, and the key to a safe deposit box. Wallingham doesn't know he has a mole in his office (Phillip Reed), who tips off Corrigan, and the race is on. Corrigan moves into new digs and starts dressing better to impress Joan, and he comes up with a honey of a scheme to retrieve this money from the woman's daughter, who is sure her mother's husband is dead.Very funny plot filled with twists and turns, and the film has great direction by Michael Curtiz. It moves like lightening. The dialogue is very funny. Cagney is not just a con artist - he plays it like he's really from the slums, which makes the difference between him and Dinehart even funnier. Also I swear he never stopped talking for the entire film.Davis is still, in 1934, moping along in these ordinary parts, wearing the blonde hair of the day and probably wondering when someone would give her a role to show off her talents. It happened soon after.Now for the dialogue. I started to wonder if someone was slipping incongruous lines into Davis' scripts. In Cabin in the Cotton, Davis utters one of the most baffling lines in film history, and actually she used it to close her interview with John Springer that toured the country: "I'd kiss you, but I just washed my hair."In Jimmy the Gent, her current boss, Wallingham, leans in for a kiss. Davis looks at him as if he's under a microscope and says, "I need a haircut."I wondered if this hair business had any significance in the early '30s. One of life's mysteries.

zafrom This 67 minute film, now out on DVD, is well worth your time and money. Just don't ask Jimmy to help you to collect your estate -- or to arrange your marriage. 'Jimmy the Gent' includes just about everyone in the Warner Bros. stock company, and you can guess that it's a pre-Code film near the beginning. After Allen Jenkins walks in, receptionist Renee Whitney curtly asks him, "Where ya been?" He replies, enthusiastically, "I've been out, lookin' up an heiress."Bette Davis, still a starlet, shows up at about 9:50, with the 1/2-inch long false eyelashes that she sports in the film. She and Cagney spar(k) well together, and Alan Dinehart is the appropriate third side of the triangle. Besides the 47 actors listed in the cast, that looks and sounds like Leonard Mudie (or his identical twin brother) as the steamship line's ticket agent near the end. And check out the newspapers at the beginning. Evidently the first sportsman died within a day or so of the Copper King, because the same soon-to-be-famous track star is mentioned in the same article on the first page.

Igenlode Wordsmith I'm not convinced that comedy was Warner Brothers' forte at this period; or maybe it's fast-paced humorous gangster movies starring Bette Davis that aren't quite my thing. At any rate, this film reminded me rather of "Satan Met a Lady", the last Warner comedy I'd seen (remembered today chiefly for the fact that it was their second version of "The Maltese Falcon", one of the few films where the remake was better than the original... but that, alas, was not to be until the third version!) To be fair, "Jimmy the Gent" is cleverer and funnier on the whole than "Satan Met a Lady"; but Bette Davis is equally uninspiring in it (one wonders how much effort she put into these supporting roles), and it isn't really my sort of film. Cheerful, generic stuff with a fair proportion of laughs and cringes (the mounting catalogue of implausible disasters at the beginning had me in hysterics), but I didn't find the hero as lovable as the film thinks he is, or the quickfire dialogue as funny as the scriptwriters presumably hoped.It was reasonably enjoyable, but not really worth the entrance fee as a rarity.

dcliff_78 I have seen this unforgettable movie but once - on television - and have been trying to find a copy to buy ever since. Such a splendid cast, with James Cagney as (cocky) 'Jimmy' Corrigan, Bette Davis as (classy) Miss Joan Martin, Allen Jenkins as (tough guy) Lou, Alan Dinehart as (smarmy) Charles Wallingham, and Alice White as (lovely) Miss MabelWhat delightful dialog. For instance, ordered to show a little class by Jimmy in his attempt to impress Miss Martin, a lady receptionist answered his phone by asking, "To whom do you wish to speak?" and then promptly blowing it with, "He ain't in." James Cagney's menacing but humorous persona verily glowed in this movie. The mold was broken when Jimmy Cagney departed.