The Mad Miss Manton

One of Barbara Stanwyck’s first chances to go screwy and she’s clearly loving it as free-spirited society dame Melsa Manton, whose madcap lifestyle is interrupted, but hardly halted, when she runs into a corpse one evening. By the time she drags a policeman to the scene the body is missing, and no one believes this isn’t another heedless adventure of hers, leaving the job of solving the crime up to her and her proto-Scooby Doo gang of girlfriends. Henry Fonda, in a slightly less straight-man persona than he would adopt for their classic pairing in The Lady Eve, plays the newspaper editor with an interest in the case, at first full of resentment for Melsa but soon going goofy over her many charms. At eighty minutes the film is a slapdash race to the finish, with as many solid gold lines as resounding clunkers. The girl sleuths are delightful as a mob, one or two getting a character trait or running joke (most effectively is Pat, who stops to eat at every crime scene). Stanwyck & Fonda play their roles broadly and out of the screwball playbook. A gem, if a rough one, for fans of screwball comedy, particularly the proliferation of mystery hybrids that followed the successful Thin Man series.