Penthouse

Gertie Waxted knows how the gangster Jim Crelliman runs his rackets, because she has been under his hand for a long time. She is secretly helping the lawyer Jackson Durant in an attempt to pin a murder on him, and her life will be in danger if that gets out. W. S. Van Dyke directed, and Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett wrote the screenplay from a novel by Arthur Somers Roche. MGM and Cosmopolitan produced it and it opened on 8 September 1933. By Myrna Loy’s own account, Van Dyke declared on this set that she was going to be a big star; The Thin Man arrived a year later. The film carries the freedom of the period before the Hays rules tightened, and it was remade in 1939, with the language softened, as Society Lawyer.