pronker Review of Two Smart People

Two Smart People (1946)

Love triumphs over smartness! As if you couldn't guess ...

[8/10 · 20 August 2014]

I give this 8/10 because it was unexpectedly good, in particular in the romance department as Love overtakes two smart people. Watching it primarily for Ball, her expressive face gliding between smugness and dismay as Hodiak foils her neat fraudulent scheme with her first 'mark' to be seen, a greedy person with too much money and not enough sense. She is fun and later in the film, quite touching in her admission of the feelings of heretofore scorned emotion, love. Hodiak is also good, and the plot fairly simple: Hodiak is an 'honest' crook, willing to endure an assured short time in prison to be freed, later to enjoy his fraudulent bonds. I liked the Mardi Gras element and the fact that the train's milieu is pointed out in their little stumbles and cramped quarters. Lloyd Nolan, stolid cop, gets a taste of the high life but doesn't succumb to any more temptations, where in a darker film, he would have - also in a darker film, we would have shootings and stabbings and failed dreams and whatnot. I did not want to see a darker film so this one, which another reviewer has likened to a Lubitsch film, suited well.