Atlantic Adventure

This is a well-preserved and snappily paced comedy-drama from Columbia, edited for speed and making use of cutaway walls to show events transpiring in two rooms at once. Although the plot with its multiple villains threatens to spin out of control and beyond comprehension it never quite loses the viewer. The cast is quite good, especially Dwight Frye as a smooth crook helping a murderer (John Wray) who is escaping justice by disguising himself as a sick old man and boarding an ocean liner to Europe. Lloyd Nolan (from the same gene pool as Ralph Fiennes if you look at him closely enough) plays a wiseacre newspaper reporter pursuing the murderer with his dimwitted pasty-faced photographer-sidekick (Harry Langdon, formerly a celebrated silent screen comedian). Mixed into this mayhem is innocent Nancy Carroll as the woman Nolan loves but, due to his demanding newspaper schedule, hardly ever sees. I won't even attempt to explain just how she gets mixed up in these shenanigans but I will say that everyone in the cast is up to the task and the whole thing moves along at a breezy pace. Although there is nothing new here, it's not a bad way to spend 68 minutes.