This film is part of the interesting John Ford at Columbia box set, in that it is a collection of films by John Ford that you would not think were John Ford films (another is Gideon's Day which follows a day in the life of a London policeman and is a curiosity worth seeing).
Edward G. Robinson plays the dual roles of a mild-mannered ordinary guy who works in an office and has fallen in love with the sparky modern gal played with great energy by Jean Arthur, but he is also the ruthless murdering gangster who is an unlikely double. Drama and comedy combine as the two men get mistaken for each other, in a movie that succeeds largely because Edward G. Robinson absolutely nails the distinctly different mannerisms of the two characters he is playing, to the extent that as an audience we need no dialogue to figure out who's who.
This is a wildly entertaining film, and audiences of the time must have been dazzled by the visual effects. To a modern audience, the back projection looks a bit obvious, but in one of the extras on the disc Leonard Maltin claims there is a scene where two Edward G. Robinsons are talking to each other within the frame: one is smoking and as he exhales, the smoke wanders in front of the other Edward G. Robinson. It's difficult to figure out how that was done with the technology of the 1930s.
If you enjoy Hollywood movies of this period, this one should suck you in within the first three minutes - quality popcorn fare from the golden age.
... as Dylan's lyric continues, "but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?"
This comes to mind when watching The Whole Town's Talking which might well be called - to continue the Dylan angle - Ballad of Fat Men, for it stars portly Edward G. Robinson, who takes two rôles in it. One of these is mild-mannered clerk Mr. Jones who, in his rooming house, aspires to write hard-boiled fiction; the other is an escaped murdering monster Mannion.
Such resemblance is a trope established in fiction long before the camera was invented, but this film (from an outline by W.R. Burnett and co-written by Robert Riskin) has particular brio, not least because it requires Robinson not only to take a very different rôle from his hard-boiled, side-of-the-mouth manner but also to guy it - as he does when reaching for a sub-machine gun (of which a henchman remarks, "this is the humane method").
All of this is hardly something one associates with its director John Ford. And, ninety years on, one must also marvel at the way in which he had the two Robinsons appear in the same shot.
The whole thing is wonderfully lit. If there is anything to lament, it is that the luminous Jean Arthur does not appear in more of this miraculous narrative.
Pedants among us might wonder what became of the bath which Jones left to overflow in the opening minutes and to relish his canary but wonder why his cat disappears for the rest of the action. Then again, that's cats for you.
Anybody who sees this masterpiece will urge it on others.