Grand Exit - 1935

Firebug strains the nerves of the fast-talking, easy-going Tom Fletcher

It sure is nice to be wanted, and that is the premise of this film. Thomas Ignatius “Tom” Fletcher (Edmund Lowe), an arson investigator, is desperately asked to return to his former employer, the Interoceanic Fire Insurance Company—the same company that had laid him off after he approved payouts on several expensive properties that burned. At the time, Fletcher was blamed for failing to find some mitigating circumstance that might have saved the company money.

Now the situation has changed. Interoceanic finds itself in desperate straits after racking up more than a million dollars in losses from payouts on six recently burned buildings, all apparently set by the same firebug. Suddenly, they can’t merely ask Fletcher to come back—they have to woo him.

If this situation reminds you of how The New York Evening Star pursued William Powell (as 'Bill' Chandler) to get back on their payroll as a scandal investigator in the 1936 Libeled Lady, it's because it looks like almost the same prelude, though the later Libeled Lady is a pure screwball comedy (and probably one of the best made in the1930s), and Grand Exit, despite the 1930s wisecracks and general "patter," is not that at all. However, this film does have one more connection to William Powell: it comes across in flavor as a bit of a knock-off of the 1934 The Thin Man.

Edmund Lowe gives his arson detective a very deep vein of humor to draw from, and the deal he demands out of Interoceanic is comical: besides the monetary remuneration, he picks out secretaries by their looks and wants them changed out daily; he wants a stocked electric refrigerator with cold beer in his office, etc. Later in the film when he has pursued but failed to track down the arsonist and his reputation is suffering (in fact that's how the character describes a particularly tall, burning building on fire: that's my reputation going up in smoke), we know what Interoceanic is thinking because they've cut him off from the beautiful, blonde string of secretaries he was seeing every day and is instead given the taciturn (and memorably physically structured) Nora Cecil as the very no-nonsense Miss Appleby.

But, gee, why is Ann Sothern (as Adrienne Martin aka Adeline Maxwell) always snooping around the burned buildings, and in some cases showing up right as they begin to fry? And isn't Onslow Stevens (as Interoceanic's other arson investigator John Grayson) perhaps a bit bitter about being made #2 to the fast-talking, laughing Tom Fletcher? Grand Exit does a nice job of spreading paranoid suspicion around the cast, and Interoceanic's executives are continually murmuring to each other maybe Fletcher is burning the buildings himself just to get his job back or in revenge at Interoceanic's for firing in the first place.

Director Erle C. Kenton and script writers Bruce Manning, Lionel Houser, Gene Towne and C. Graham Baker keep Grand Exit exit moving forward, and though this is not a comedy, it has solid comedy underpinnings whenever Ann Sothern and Edmund Lowe are together on screen and dueling with snappy, snarky language. Peppery wordplay was a particularly grandiloquent feature of many 1930s movies, apparently mastering the use of recorded sound on film after decades of silent movies tapped into a mother lode of dialogue that needed airing, and everyone seemed to talk faster and to certainly have a lot more fun with language in that era.

Grand Exit is a fine example of the vague Hollywood genre of professional men doing dangerous things, in this case we get a lot of footage of real burning buildings and this certainly gets across the idea that an arsonist is someone who is practicing a lateral profession just a few steps away from mass murderer. The "heat" turns up in the film as the burnings continue and the suspects narrow.

Lowe and Sothern are very good in these relatively straight-forward roles, though Lowe is certainly the dominant character and Sothern isn't given enough of the sort of ironic lines she was so good at in later films. We do start to wonder what's going on as she seems to be more and more involved with, mysteriously, with the question of who exactly is burning all these buildings down.

Interoceanic's offices provide a funny gallery of executives who can't resist making the wrong decisions in order to save a nickel though they're risking millions in the process. We do get a dignified and serious Edward Van Sloan (better known as the Van Helsing that faced down Lugosi's Dracula a few years earlier) as a level-headed insurance executive who can see through the blather of his fellow directors at Interoceanic, and can see through Lowe's character's blather, too, knowing this is the guy they need to stop the carnage, no matter how ridiculous Fletcher makes the terms.

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