FAST AND FURIOUS (1939)

On a hot summer day, Garda Sloane (Ann Sothren) turns up the heat in the office of her husband Joel (Franchot Tone), hoping he'll take the hint and split the city for a resort vacation. As it happens, his old college friend Mike (Lee Bowman) is running a beauty pageant at Seaside City; Joel loans Mike a few thousand dollars to invest in it and is promised a judging slot, so Garda gets her wish and the two take off for the shore. But there's trouble in store. First, Garda gets jealous when Joel takes his judging duties too seriously. Then Joel finds out that Bartell, the promoter, may be a swindler who is collecting money to pay off a gangster named Connors. Bartell winds up dead and the cops think Mike did it, so Joel and Garda, with some help from a flirtatious reporter named Bentley (Allyn Joslyn), try to clear his name. Suspects include Connors; Lily (Ruth Hussey), Bartell’s associate; and a pageant contestant named Jerry.

This is the third entry in a B-mystery series (seemingly modeled on the Thin Man movies) which featured the Sloanes, rare book dealers, though you'd be hard pressed to know that from this movie as the book element is pretty much absent here. In each film, a different pair of actors played the leads; Tone and Sothern (pictured) are no better or worse than Robert Montgomery and Rosalind Russell in the previous entry, FAST AND LOOSE (I have not yet seen the first one, FAST COMPANY with Melvyn Douglas and Florence Rice). The mystery elements are weaker than the comic elements, and that's OK as the cast handles the humor well. There is a running gag involving lions that has a nice payoff at the end. The functional direction is by Busby Berkeley, a long way from his classic 1930s musicals. The 70 minutes go by quickly; generally, it's not terribly memorable but not hard to watch. [TCM]