This is an old movie I caught on cable. It stars Spencer Tracy (my all-time favorite actor) and Myrna Loy (of The Thin Man and Mr. Blandings fame). It was directed by Sam Wood who I've never heard of but it turns out he has a good resume including A Night at the Opera, A Day at the Races, The Pride of the Yankees, Goodbye, Mr. Chips, and Our Town. So coming from these people it should be a great film. Unfortunately it's only ok.
Loy plays one of a group of theives who's stolen 4 extremely valuable pearls. She's separated from her group and the cops are following her to get to them. Tracy is a federal agent, pretending to be a thug who ends up on the lamb with her, though he's trying to find the pearls as well. There's more but the basic plot is the paired up strangers trying to deal with each other. It never really connects but is ok.
One thing that I noticed in this and the Harold Lloyd films is that these films are really a window onto a different age. On the one hand I know 70 years isn't that long, but on the other hand the differences are apparent. People pulled up to a strange house while driving in a rain storm and the people let them in. A flight to Kansas City makes three 10 minute stops along the way and people get on and off the plane with no security checks. In a car accident no one asks for identification or proof of insurance and the parties just drive off. Phones aren't everywhere, they go out during storms, and the mouth and ear pieces are separate. Though we might not think it, slang was commonly used though quite different from now. The title is slang though I didn't catch the meaning (yes the dictionary has it, to be cheated in two ways at once). There was no TV, no nuclear anything, no space program, World War II hadn't happened, and Iraq was granted independence from Britian just 3 years prior. Old movies are time machines in a way that photos and books can't be.
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