This Claude Rains film is worth seeing simply because it is so ultra-bizarre, with the strangest opening sequence I've ever seen. It looks as if the film was written and directed by Salvador Dali at some points, not Ben Hecht and Charles McArthur!! You really have to see it to believe it and I couldn't do it justice trying to describe it further.Rains plays Lee Gentry, a hot-shot lawyer who seems to be able to get guilty clients off for crimes with ease. Naturally the cops and prosecutors hate him but what can they do? Well, they can let Gentry destroy himself...which he does when he shoots a girlfriend in a fit of jealousy! What's next? Well, see for yourself.The style is much better than the story itself and lovers of the strange MUST see this one! Clever and very original even if the story itself seems pretty weird.

This is an unusual and surreal little film, starting from the beginning. The prologue says that the three furies go about the world enticing people to do evil. Then a shadowed figure of a man shoots a woman in cold blood and out of the droplets of the blood come the three furies, looking and laughing like female demons racing into the night.Then we are in criminal attorney Lee Gentry's (Claude Rains) office. He is mentioning to his legal secretary how he wants to get rid of his current girlfriend, Carmen Brown, a cabaret dancer (Margo), but that instead of that he wound up in a flurry of kisses and vows with her, once again. He wants to dump her for the ice queen, Katy, who does not seem nearly as enthused about him as he is about her. Basically Gentry delivers a monologue about how he just can't resist figuring out what makes the women in his life tick, getting them head over heels in love with him, and then their adoration repels him and causes him to reject them. You get the feeling that maybe Gentry has a 50ish legal secretary exactly because he does not want his bad personal romantic habits to follow him into the office.In the next scenes Gentry gets everybody on his bad side, the prosecutor, the police, he even sets up a situation to make it look like he feels Carmen has been unfaithful and that is why he is leaving her, making her feel their breakup is her own fault. Up to now everything Gentry has done is because he thinks he is better than everybody else, smarter, that he can take what he wants and not care for other people's feelings. And then he performs one unselfish act and it turns into what could be construed as murder. The police and prosecutors are certainly not going to go easy on him or believe him after he has made fools of them in court on a regular basis. So he sets out to make it look like he could not have committed the murder. His legal mind constructs an intricate alibi, even setting up an alternate fall guy for the murder.How does this all pan out? Watch and find out. The ending is like a cross between something Robert Serling and Alfred Hitchcock would come up with. Highly recommended. This practically one man show will hold your interest throughout partly due to Ben Hecht's talented writing and direction, and partly due to Rains' outstanding performance.

This moody little independent film – written, produced and directed by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur (the men behind the popular play "The Front Page," the source for 'His Girl Friday (1940)') – was also the third major role for Claude Raines, fresh from his stunning debut in 'The Invisible Man (1933).' Though largely a down-to-earth, if slightly cerebral, crime drama, 'Crime Without Passion' opens with a jaw dropping prologue, in which frightening, barely-clothed nymphs rise from the ground and cackle ecstatically at the sin running rampart through the city: murder, violence, adultery.In the main story, Lee Gentry (Raines) is a high-profile lawyer who makes his living from acquitting guilty men, even if that means lying and fabricating evidence. Gentry has a new woman in his life (Whitney Bourne), but can't rid himself of the old one (Margo Albert, or just plain Margo). When Gentry commits the ultimate crime, his lucid legal mind, speaking through a ghostly mental apparition, narrates him through the process of destroying evidence and establishing an alibi. But can he get away with it?Though very tense for the most part, I did feel a little let down by the ending. We learn, too late for our increasingly paranoid protagonist, that Carmen Brown was not actually dead, and had merely fainted in response to Gentry's gunshot. This seems an unlikely misdiagnosis from the cool, methodical lawyer; perhaps such a character blunder could only arise in a period when cinematic murders were necessarily bloodless, as chartered by the Production Code. Or maybe this is Hecht and MacArthur suggesting that, despite Gentry's belief that he is always in control, his state of mind at that moment was no less garbled than your average two-bit criminal.

One of the first indie features. Made by writers Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur (Of "The Front Page""Twentieth Century" fame at the Paramount Astoria Studios outside of NYC. (Rumor has it the filmmakers had poster a sign- "Screw Adoplh Zukor" on the studio door. Zukor was then head of Paramount!) Film begins with a wild montage of near nude furies soaring over Manhattan and attacking various sinners. It's a scene that will floor you, and keep you glued to the screen! Then we go to the center of the story, attorney Lee Gentry (a superb Claude Rains), a womanizing, authority hating egomaniac. During an argument with his mistress, singer Carman Brown (Margo) Gentry accidentally fires a gun at Carman. Thinking her dead, he builds up an alibi. Torn by the fear that he might get caught by a legal system he belittles, he goes deeper into insanity and crime. I won't say what happens, but those furies get the last laugh. Obviously a small budget was used here, but this is fantastic film-making. Don't miss!