Tag Archives: Pat O’Brien

Hildy Johnson, newspaper reporter, is engaged to Peggy Grant and planning to move to New York for a higher paying advertising job. The court press room is full of lame reporters who invent stories as much as write them. All are waiting to cover the hanging of Earl Williams. When Williams escapes from the inept Sheriff, Hildy seizes the opportunity by using his $260 honeymoon money to payoff an insider and get the scoop on the escape. However, Walter Burns, the Post’s editor, is slow to repay Hildy back, hoping that he will stay on the story. Getting a major scoop looks possible when Hildy stumbles onto the bewildered escapee and hides him in a roll-top desk in the press room. Burns shows up to help. Can they keep Williams’ whereabouts secret long enough to get the scoop, especially with the Sheriff and other reporters hovering around?
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Man Alive is an inventive and consistently amusing farce dominated by stars Pat O’Brien and Adolphe Menjou. The former plays Speed, a moderately successful garage owner. Suspecting that his wife Connie (Ellen Drew) has fallen in love with old college buddy Gordon (Rudy Vallee), Speed goes off on a bender. During a long and drunken night, he gives his clothes and his car to an old tramp named Willie the Wino (Jack Norton). With Speed as his passenger, Willie piles the car into a river. Willie drowns, but Speed is rescued by showboat entrepreneur Kismet (Menjou). When the car is recovered, it is assumed that the body inside is Speed’s. Speed wakes up thinking he’s dead because Kismet is wearing a devil’s costume (for a stage show) while stoking coal into the ship’s furnace! When he tries to get back to his wife, O’Brien is urged by kibitzer Menjou to act as a ghost to find out if her love for him is real or if she’s actually in love with Gordy, leading to a series of increasingly zany consequences.
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James Curtayne has retired from law but he returns to defend John O’Hara on a murder charge. Curtayne’s drinking and rustiness result in O’Hara’s being found guilty, but Curtayne makes further efforts to prove him innocent.
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Two lazy screenwriters need a story for the studio’s cowboy star. A studio waitress turns out to be pregnant. This gives them the idea for a movie about a cowboy and a baby. The waitress’s baby becomes the star. The cowboy and his agent run off with the waitress and her valuable asset. The writers retaliate by hiring an unemployed extra to impersonate the baby’s father. But the extra already knows the waitress…
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Ex-policeman Vince Kane is a partner with Joe Farley as bail bond brokers, but retains his ties and friendship with the police and Detective Nick Ferrone. Ferrone picks up Claude Brackette, a brokerage clerk, as a suspect in the securities robbery in which a policeman was killed, and Kane goes with him when the detective searches Brackett’s apartment, and Kane finds that Brackett’s wife, Lucy, is his former sweetheart. She insists her husband is innocent and pleads with Kane to get him out on bail but she has only $4,000 of the $25,000 needed. A mysterious emissary puts up $12,000 and Kanes, over Farley’s protest, makes up the rest from the company’s money. Brackett is murdered after his release. For Lucy, Kane investigates and finds that Brackett had dealings with night club owner Jerry McKay and a hoodlum named Roy Collins. Suspecting McKay was in back of the robbery, Kane begins a campaign in which he himself behaves like a crook, and demands a heavy bride from McKay for his …
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