July 28 – Aug 3 Screwball Comedy: Just imagine, the Great Depression is raging and you’re getting less than a fin a week at the rubber boiling factory, but it only costs two bits to go to the movies all day, so let’s watch some quick-talking dames match wits with some dopey joes!

Private detective Ted Shane (Warren Williams) and his former partner Milton Ames (Porter Hall) start to work together again, which hits a bad patch when he learns that his wife Astrid (Winifred Shaw) and Ted were once an item. When Valerie Purvis (Bette Davis) hires them to find a man named Farrow, it ends with Milton and that man dead, and the police thinking Ted’s the killer.

Ted makes it back to their office, only to find his secretary, Miss Murgatroyd (Marie Wilson), locked in a closet. Anthony Travers (Arthur Treacher) is going through his office, and the henchmen of Madame Barabbas (Alison Shipworth) are coming to bring him to the crime boss. Everyone is looking for a ram’s horn filled with gems, which may or may not be real, and Ted plays everyone for fools until he gets the same treatment from Valerie, the real murderer.

Directed by William Dieterle and written by Brown Holmes, this film was made because Warner Bros. attempted to re-release The Maltese Falcon but was denied approval by the Hays Production Code censors. The 1931 one with Ricardo Cortez and Bebe Daniels. The one that we know and love wasn’t made until 1941 and skips the parts that would keep it from playing.

Bette Davis saw this movie as junk. She claimed in her book The Lonely Life. “I was so distressed by the whole tone of the script and the vapidity of my part that I marched up to Mr. Warner’s office and demanded that I be given work that was commensurate with my proven ability,” she later recalled in her autobiography. “I was promised wonderful things if only I would do this film.” She was suspended but needed to cover living expenses for her mother and medical care for her sister. That’s why she made this.