Fast-talking Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday (1940) was the most famous example, but the movies of the 1930s and 40s were full of gimlet-eyed lady reporters who'd get the scoop at any cost - a plausible way to justify a heroine traveling through circles of power usually closed off to women of the era. In this investigative drama written by legendary journalist Adela Rogers St. John, real-life friends Joan Blondell and Pat O'Brien star as a crack reporter (her) and an editor (him) who go to battle over a murder case that is not what it seems to be at first glance. It's unusual to think of Blondell, who excelled at playing hard-boiled chorines, as being the soft heart of a movie, but here, as the reporter whose deft touch with the "human angle" (read: feminine slant), she brings questions about journalistic ethics and human nature into what's otherwise another bullpen romance.

By Violet LeVoit