MAJESTIC THEATRE.

Evening Post, Volume CXXVI, Issue 132, 1 December 1938, Page 15

MAJESTIC THEATRE.

"A Slight Case of Murder."

Everyone who knows "More Than Somewhat," which swept all London ! into its engaging net a year or so ago, and "Furthermore," which followed it, will appreciate the fact that when Damon Runyon writes a story it is not like other stories. And Warner Bros.First National have had the happy idea of letting him take the gangsters and "dolls" and "citizens" of whom he has made such successful use and put them into a movie. The result is "A Slight Case of Murder," which is to be screened at the Majestic Theatre tomorrow. The title itself is evidence of his system of under-statement, for the slight case of murder involves foui bodies in one room. But the point is that they are found by a one-time racketeer, who has grown respectable since Prohibition (with disastrous effects to his business), but whose record is still not what it might be. The facts that the bank is threatening to take over his brewery, that his daughter is engag -1 to a young man who has just become a policeman, that there is the loot of a big robbery hidden in the house and a gunman lurking about in the effort to escape with it are woven into an ingenious story, full of surprises, replete with laughs. "A Slight Case of Murder" is one of those films which ' produces laughter hours after it has been screened; the sheer force of its humour is so great. It is played by a cast which is equal to its demands in every way. Edward G. Robinson, the "Little Caesar" of the screen, has the role of the reformed racketeer who has become "legitimate," I Ruth Donnelly is his wife, and her successive jolts to her memory that she is now "high-toned" and her efforts to make her husband's henchmen play up to th?ir new level are responsible for much of the humour. Harold Huber, Edward Brophy, and Allen Jenkins (a triumph) are the chief members of the gang, always mingling their own business with that of their chief and strangely incongruous as servants where once they were employed as strongarm men. There is romance but it is left to Jane Bryan and Willard Parker, an attractive pair.