Miss Manton Was Mad And Merry

Radio Record, Volume XII, Issue 35, 10 February 1939, Page 14

Miss Manton Was Mad And Merry

["The Mad Miss Manton." R.K.O. Directed by Leigh Jason. Starring Barbara Stanwyck, Henry Fonda. Released this week.] LESS I’m mistaken, the average girl, walking into a dark room in an empty house, and finding a_ particularly messy corpse, would be cured of any further desire, to investigate murders. But not the mad Miss Manton. The mad Miss Manton, of course, had a rather special reason for staying on the scent. When she summoned the police to view her corpse, the latter (i.c., the corpse) had inconveniently disappeared; and the police thought it was just another of the mad Miss Manton’s girlish Park Avenue pranks. So did the editor, young and handsome, of a certain newspaper. Therefore, rather bitterly, he wrote up Miss Manton as a social parasite, who had nothing better to do with herself and her money than annoy the police. Which more or

less put the mad Miss Manton on her mettle to discover her disappearing corpse and make the editor eat his words. Bunch Of Beauties HIS is what constitutes ihe theme of "The Mad Miss Manton," another of those films in which Hollywood demonstrates that crime is @ laughing matter. Sometimes the joke is a bit laboured, but it’s amusing enough and exciting enougn if you keep our tongue fairly firmly in your cheek and don’t try to worry too much about solving the mystery. Leave that to the mad Miss Manton, or rather to Barbara Stanwyck. She’s assisted by a bunch of Park Avenue beauties who are more decorative than useful, and what with one thing and another, they manage to make life pretty desperate for Sam Levene, who's the detective in charge of the case, and for Henry Fonda, who’s the editor who begins by abusing Miss Manton and-how did you guess?-ends by marrying her. If you like a thriller with plenty of corpses, "The Mad Miss Manton" has at least the preliminary requirements, for there’s one in the ice-box and one in the back seat of a car-not to mention the one that disappeared (though come to think of it, I’m not sure that wasn’t the same one as turned up in. the car. Or was that the one in the icebox?). For A Change N most previous occasions when " T’ve seen Barbara Stanwyck she’s been breaking her heart over (a) marrying a man she doesn’t love, (b) losing a baby she does; so this time it was rather a pleasant surprise to find her in a com-edy-even if it was a crazy one.