Me and My Gal

Raoul Walsh's 1932 film is a police comedy carrying the speed and looseness of Hollywood before the Hays Code. Danny Dolan, a young officer, falls for Helen Riley, a waitress at a waterfront café. The story is loose and rests on exchanges of dialogue rather than plot; the pace between Spencer Tracy and Joan Bennett is the whole of its appeal. Its strangest passage is the scene in which the characters mock a film then newly in cinemas, an adaptation of Eugene O'Neill, by imitating it; the cinema refers to itself. Walsh's direction holds no scene longer than it needs. The sexual implication and class mockery of the pre-Code period sit comfortably here. Who it's for: viewers interested in pre-Code Hollywood and early Spencer Tracy. Who it's not for: anyone wanting a tight plot, or troubled by the period's clichés about Irish immigrants.