Director: William Clemens
Ross Alexander’s career took off a few years too late. His smug, cynical persona might have been a better match for early-1930s Warner Brothers comedies, but instead was relegated to filling in supporting roles in pictures like A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Captain Blood. Physically, he looks like a young Jack Benny stretched out into Jimmy Stewart’s frame, and he performs with a moderately more wholesome approach to Lee Tracy’s sense of embitterment. Here Comes Carter was his penultimate film before his death by his own hands, and if the screenplay doesn’t offer him many memorable wisecracks, it does admirably highlight the career that could have been. He plays a press agent turned gossip columnist who begins to spread dirt on a star with mob connections (Craig Reynolds), putting his career and life in jeopardy. A romantic triangle involving Glenda Farrell and Anne Nagel barely gets off the ground, but both women bring something to the picture—Farrell, as always, is a wisecracking delight, and she also earns empathy by giving a few pained reaction shots as her boss flirts with Nagel (his inevitable wife of choice). Among the memorable supporting turns is John Sheehan as a star who takes issue with Alexander’s radio show… only he’s so starstruck and flattered by Alexander’s charms that he doesn’t do much about it!
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