The Cinema
"Looking for Trouble." At the Leicester Square Theatre Horixwoon methods are seen at their best in this kind of film—a fast-moving adventure story with a realistic back- ground of city life. Joe Graham and Casey are telephone " trouble-shooters "—men who go off to mend faulty appar- atus anywhere at a moment's notice. The plot is chiefly about a gang of crooks who pose as estate agents while tapping the wires in their office building in order to get early news of stock deals and bank transfers. They are discovered by Graham and Casey, and later on one of the crooks is found murdered. Suspicion falls on Graham's sweetheart, and the rest of the film deals with Graham's frenzied efforts to trace a night-club girl who knows the real secret of the crime.
One good point is that these adventures, though even in the American telephone service they must be uncommon, have a distinctive character. They could only happen to telephone men ; and all sorts of technical details of telephone work are effectively woven into the action. It is much harder to invent a distinctive love-story, and the various quarrels and misun- derstandings between Graham and his sweetheart follow a somewhat familiar course. They are necessary to the plot, but Graham, prodigiously alert and resourceful when he is out on a job, has to exhibit in his private affairs the usual incredible obtuseness of the melodramatic hero. Another criticism might be that to introduce a Pacific Coast earthquake at the most critical moment of the story—when the night-club girl is at last cornered and about to speak—is really too much of a good thing. But the earthquake is highly realistic, con- i•eying impressively the sudden terror of crumbling walls and gaping pavements, and it provides a thoroughly exciting climax, with a daringly irnprovized telephone line to police headquarters serving as an appropriate medium for the final vindication of justice.
There is not much scope here for the subtleties of acting, but Spencer Tracy makes Graham a lifelike figure ; Jack Oakie is even more cheerfully amusing than usual, and Constance Cummings gives a certain elegance to the part of Graham's sweetheart. Looking for Trouble is no more than a " thriller," but I would call it an exceptionally good one, largely because of its skilful blending of breathless adventure with technical routine.
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