Saturday Night Cinema: Manhattan Melodrama (1934)

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Tonight’s Saturday Night Cinema selection is Manhattan Melodrama, one of MGM’s prestige productions back then and winner of the Original Story Oscar. Written by the brilliant Joseph L. Mankiewicz and directed by  W.S. Van Dyke, the film stars the heart-thumping Clark Gable, William Powell, and in a star-turning performance, Myrna Loy. This is the film that catapulted her to stardom.

Manhattan Melodrama was made by MGM in the same year that Gable appeared in Columbia’s It Happened One Night, directed by Frank Capra, for which Gable (the King) received his first of three Best Actor nominations and his only Oscar.

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Notorious as the movie that gangster John Dillinger attended on the night he was killed, Manhattan Melodrama has weathered the years as one of MGM’s finest examples of pure storytelling. The pageant-like story begins in 1904, when the excursion steamer “General Slocum” blows up and burns in the East River. Two young boys are orphaned by the disaster. They are adopted by a kindly Jewish businessman (Harry Green) who has lost his own children. Years later, when he is killed during a anarchist rally, the boys are separated once more. They grow up to be straight-arrow attorney Jim Wade (William Powell) and big-time gambler Blackie Gallagher (Clark Gable). Though the two men still like and respect one another, they are now on opposite sides of the legal fence. The professional rivalry becomes personal when Jim marries Blackie’s ex-mistress Eleanor (Myrna Loy). The typically stellar MGM supporting cast includes Nat Pendleton as Blackie’s faithful stooge, Isabel Jewell as his addled girlfriend, Mickey Rooney as the younger Blackie (a marvelous piece of mimicry here), and blonde singer Shirley Ross, here appearing in blackface in a Harlem nightclub sequence, singing a new Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart tune that would later gain popularity (with different lyrics) as “Blue Moon.”

 

https://youtu.be/NAvcdjOhm5w

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Cary Morris
Cary Morris
6 years ago

This is an excellent choice and enjoyable.

Ethan Sparrow
Ethan Sparrow
6 years ago

Thanks, Pam…
I look forward to your pick every week…
A small thing…but a break from all the chaos…

Ray_Sears
Ray_Sears
6 years ago

I wish I could watch it, but I refuse to give YouTube my VISA Card # because they have been hacked in the past, and the information gained used to rip people off ! So I’ll Pass !

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Thanks for sharing!