There's Always A Woman - 1938

Two detectives on one case

Fast Review

There's Always A Woman - 1938: Melvyn Douglas and Joan Blondell are a husband-wife team working from opposite sides on a murder mystery, with the story filled with their funny confrontations as clues are assembled and the mystery solved. The film starts with Douglas' character abandoning his floundering private investigation service and returning to a public servant job as a District Attorney, but Blondell's character is determined to keep their bankrupt family business going and almost immediately picks up a new client, a distressed Mary Astor who needs her husband watched because she's afraid he's mixed up with another woman. Since Blondell's character becomes a detective on the spur of the moment (she had originally come to the office to act as her husband's secretary after the original one was laid off) she tries to keep everyone in the dark about her new activities as a sleuth, and this leads to a lot of silly misunderstandings and helps feed the humorous bickering (and the general banter) of the two leads throwing lines at each other, back and forth, like a tennis match (the list of writers on this film is long: Gladys Lehman, Wilson Collison, Philip Rapp, Morrie Ryskind and Joel Sayre).

Melvyn Douglas and Blondell were both experienced at screwball comedy work by the time this 1938 film was made, and they bring their particular styles of high energy performance to their roles. However, since they're each somewhat similar in some ways in how they apply that energy (physically, and especially so with a hard-working Blondell scampering through the story trying to turn up the identity of the killer) There's Always A Woman can be a bit exhausting at times because director Alexander Hall doesn't take many breaks to let things cool down. Each time Mary Astor is allowed back into the story she transports the tale to a slower, more focused pace (just as she did a few years later as a different detective's client in The Maltese Falcon) but with Blondell and Douglas humorously and continuously at each other's throats, the friction between the two becomes a little engine for continuous one-liners. The one drawback to this film is that this "little engine" gets close to blurring the distinctions between the two actor's characters.

The breakneck pacing aside, Blondell is sharp and cutting with her dialogue and she moves as fast as any Marx Brother across the screen as she hunts down who-did-what-to-who. Douglas' long-suffering husband is usually two steps behind her (and his boss, played by Thurston Hall, is three steps behind) as she does all the hard work to make the evidence gel into a clear cut accusation. Douglas isn't completely overshadowed in There's Always A Woman, but though his character is presented as competent, professional and clever (and when with Blondell on screen he's supplied with plenty of fast-talking dialogue), Blondell is the one that pulls this story over the finish line.

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Original Page October 15, 2025