Years before he became writer-director Preston Sturges's go-to leading man, Joel McCrea got to show how well he could play romantic comedy with his loan to MGM for Woman Wanted (1935). He stars as womanizing society lawyer Tony Baxter, who gets pulled into the world of crime when beautiful murder suspect Maureen O'Sullivan steals a ride in his limousine. All he has to do is clear her name while hiding her from the police, his fiancée and the hoods who set her up.

With its mixture of crime and comedy, Woman Wanted fit nicely into the mold established at MGM by The Thin Man (1934), leavening the mayhem with sophisticated laughs. It even possessed a screwball element, with runaway convict O'Sullivan shaking up McCrea's staid existence. Adding to that effect was the performance of Robert Grieg, another actor who would eventually join the Sturges stock company, assaying the latest in his line of butlers whose stiff demeanor masks a mischievous heart and acerbic tongue. The film also features one pure bit of screwball, when the leads hide out in a deserted diner, where McCrea manages to convince some of the gangsters he works there, and then eludes arrest by getting the local constable drunk.

Although he was the fourth director assigned to the film (following Richard Boleslawski and J. Walter Ruben, who were taken off it to work on other pictures, and Harry Beaumont, who walked off because he disliked the script), director George B. Seitz was a natural for this kind of material. He had started in the industry writing screenplays for serials like The Perils of Pauline (1914), which led to directing. Those early films also taught him how to keep the action moving, making him a rarity at MGM, where he would finish his career. Unlike other house directors like Robert Z. Leonard and Clarence Brown, who often let their cameras linger over the studio's lush production elements, Seitz preferred to cut to the chase, making him a natural for lighter pictures. Within two years of his work on this film, he would re-team with Lewis Stone, who plays the district attorney, for the Hardy Family series.

When Franchot Tone was taken off the film to star in Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), Woman Wanted marked a return to MGM for McCrea, who had been under contract briefly there during his early Hollywood years. The studio had mostly confined him to minor roles, and it wasn't until he moved to RKO in 1930 that he began getting the star build-up. Despite impressive performances in the Polynesian romance Bird of Paradise and the thriller The Most Dangerous Game (both 1932), however, he was mostly cast in romantic dramas and comedies, which made him a natural for this light-hearted feature. With his next film, Barbary Coast (1935), he would sign a contract with independent producer Samuel Goldwyn, who would move him into more diverse roles.

O'Sullivan had starred in two Tarzan films by the time she made Woman Wanted, and her berth at MGM was pretty much set. She could star as Jane and in minor films like this one, but for the most part played supporting roles in A films like The Thin Man, The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934) and Anna Karenina (1935), which she had just completed at the time this film went into production.

Along with Stone and Grieg, Woman Wanted contained several notable supporting players. The lead gangster, Smiley Gordon, is played by Louis Calhern during his second attempt at a film career. The stage veteran had appeared in a few silent films in the 1920s, then returned to the screen in the early 1930s to play a series of supporting roles, mostly as sophisticates and heavies. Unhappy with the range of parts offered him, Calhern would continue returning to the stage, where he toured in Life with Father for three years before starring as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in The Magnificent Yankee (a role he would bring to the screen in 1950). He did not become a regular Hollywood resident until 1949, when he signed with MGM, where he specialized in sophisticated supporting roles in everything from Two Weeks with Love to The Asphalt Jungle (both 1950). Also giving notable performances are Edgar Kennedy, master of the slow burn, as the house detective convinced McCrea is harboring the escaped murderess and Adrienne Ames, a society girl turned actress, as McCrea's on-again, off-again fiancée. A noted beauty who combined Tallulah Bankhead's sultriness with Bette Davis eyes, Ames was most famous for a tax audit in which she claimed over $9,000 in deductions for wardrobe, flowers, massages and maid service, all of which she considered essential to maintaining her career.

Producer: Phil Goldstone (uncredited)
Director: George B. Seitz
Screenplay: Leonard Fields, Dave Silverstein (screenplay); Wilson Collison (story); Otis Garrett, Kubec Glasmon, Leon Gordon, George Hanneman, Kathryn Scola (contributing writers, uncredited)
Cinematography: Charles Clarke
Art Direction: Cedric Gibbons
Music: Dr. William Axt
Film Editing: Ben Lewis
Cast: Maureen O'Sullivan (Ann Gray), Joel McCrea (Anthony 'Tony' Baxter), Lewis Stone (District Attorney Martin), Louis Calhern (Smiley Gordon), Edgar Kennedy (House Detective Sweeney), Adrienne Ames (Betty Randolph), Robert Grieg (Peedles, Tony's Butler), Noel Madison (Joe Metz, Smiley's Henchman), Granville Bates (Casey, scenes deleted), William B. Davidson (Detective Collins).
BW-67m.

by Frank Miller