VIRTUE (1932)

Columbia programmer for Carole Lombard (away from top-drawer home studio Paramount), a sweet ‘Pre-Code’  find even with a missing picture element for the first minute & a half.  (Tossed out to comply with stricter Production Code enforcement on a later re-release?)  Director Edward Buzzell, best known for some of the worst Marx Bros. pics, taking advantage of fine work from Frank Capra regulars writer Robert Riskin & lenser Joseph Walker.  Some clever twists get us thru a melodramatically stuffed 68 minutes as Lombard ignores a get-out-of-town decree on a solicitation charge (that’s the missing piece at the start), returning to take Pat O’Brien’s cabby for quite the ride.  A guy who doesn’t trust dames, he falls hard, gets hitched, then thinks he sees Lombard back at her old ways.  Truth is, she’s doing it all for him!  But when a gal pal weasels on an emergency loan and is killed by her lowlife lover, circumstantial evidence pins the murder on Lombard.  Yikes!  Lombard, looking fabu & aces in the acting department, brings out the best in O’Brien (he’s less oafish than usual, as close to Cagney as he ever got*); with standout perfs by girlfriends Shirley Grey and especially Mayo Methot (Mrs. Humphrey Bogart).  Buzzell stiffs his editor with missing angles here & there, but this is still a swell pic.

DOUBLE-BILL: *Sure enough, this follows James Cagney’s hack driver in TAXI/’31 by a year.  It's mostly remembered for Cagney in a fluent bit of Yiddish, but just this once, O’Brien got the better film.