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Dick Powell plays the reporter who gets a supernatural scoop on the next day's news and finds the police on his tail! Its light touch wouldn't have shamed Lubitsch says David Parkinson.

It's odd how Gallic exiles in Hollywood never fared as well as their Germanic counterparts. But, while René Clair's satire about an obituary writer who becomes an ace reporter when a ghost feeds him the next day's headlines doesn't touch the landmark pictures he had made either side of the coming of sound, it is still enormously engaging and is staged with a knowing lightness that wouldn't have shamed Ernst Lubitsch.

Crooner Dick Powell is affably roguish as the 1890s Mid-West journo who exploits a stroke of supernatural luck to boost his prospects and charm visiting theatrical Linda Darnell. But he is ably supported by Jack Oakie as a doubting fake medium and Edgar Kennedy as a cop who becomes increasingly suspicious about Powell's sudden ability to predict imminent crimes. Smartly scripted by Dudley Nicholls from a Lord Dunsany play, the tale naturally had to contain a cautionary element and the manner in which Powell learns his lesson about dabbling in things he doesn't understand is as fiendishly neat as it's gleefully contrived.

 

David Parkinson on 12th September 2011
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