Don't underestimate this spunky old last (Fay Bainter) when it comes to fighting crime. Disgusted by a quarter protection fee added to her laundry Bill, granny gets her gun. The rich eccentric hires former New York backwaters to take on the ones in her city, and before long, she's got the criminals shaking in their boots as she threatens to take on city hall. She pulls a gun on them, threatens to the expose the corrupt mayor, kidnaps one of the top criminals and dares to escape from the local jail. This feisty granny without the tweety bird is as brave as Jimmy Stewart was as the junior senator framed in "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington", released the same year. In fact, this is so clues to the types of films that Columbia studios had been putting out ever since Mr. Deeds had gone to town that this could definitely be called Capra- corn with a feminine twist. Just coming off her Oscar winning performance in "Jezebel", Bainter is a delight, funny and feisty and seemingly without fear. She gets a moving monologue that with what was going on over in Europe was certainly timely. Rackateer bullies are as dangerous as Hitler, Mussolini and other dictators, she insinuates without mentioning any names, and it us better to die fighting for your liberty than be living in fear under the thumb of brutality.Not quite a major star yet, Ida Lupino is featured as Bainter's future daughter in law. Lee Bowman is barely adequate as her son, but Warren Hymer adds laughs as the chauffeur with a criminal past whose chums are a cross between Curly from the Three Stooges and various classic cartoon characters. It is obvious how this will pan out, but it is fun getting there.

****SPOILERS**** It's when grandmotherly and bank president Hattie Leonard, Fay Baitner, is charged $2.00 instead of her usual weekly $1.75 fee for dry cleaning that she decides to investigate why all of a sudden her dry cleaning bill rose some 15%! This in 1939 when inflation was on the way down due to the economic downturn in prices & wages of the ravages Great 1930's Depression! Discovering from the person who's been doing and laundry & dry cleaning for the last 15 years Zambrogio, Henry Armetta, that there's a protection racket going on in the little town of Macklin City for years Hattie decides to take matters or the law into her own hands! And thus do the job that the city's Mayor Jones, Brandon Tynan. and the police refuse or can't do. Run the hoods running this protection racket out of town and behind bars!Hilarious crime comedy with Hattie and her cabbie and ex-con friend Frankie Fallon, Warren Hymer, organize a mob of their own to put an end to the laundry and dry cleaning racket in Macklin City. Not quite realizing what he's up against, the little old lady who lives in the big house up the hill, mobster George Watson, George Meeker, send his collectors like Harry the Lug, Harold Huber, out to shake down the local laundry and dry cleaning businesses in town. Harry the Lug instead f collecting protection money ends up getting kidnapped by Hattie's mob and by being threatened, when nothing else would work, with gulping down an entire bottle of yucky & smelly Castor Oil finally spilled the beans. Not only his boss George Watson but the boss of bosses of the entire dry cleaning and laundry protection operation the chief executive of the town of Macklin City the honorable Mayor Jones Himself!***SPOILERS**** With Hattie framed arrested and put behind bars on a phony kidnapping charge, against Harry the Lug, she in turn got the goods on Mayor Jones in having his pay off or protection money marked and put in his personal safety deposit box at her bank! Not realizing that he had unknowingly implicated himself in this city wide protection racket Mayor Jones ends up arrested and put behind bars as the movie comes to an end. That's not after in him being the chief justice officially marrying Hattie grandson Fred, Lee Bowman, and his fiancée Lila Thorne, Ida Lupino, before he's relives of his duties as mayor and driven to jail in a police paddy wagon.

For some reason, this film made me laugh out loud...maybe I was just tired or maybe it is as good as that. The story line, the actors and the general goofiness of it are just so endearing.The acting ensemble is perfect from Fay Bainter to Warren Hymer (he is the Thorndyke of the "Give 'em the tacks" line) to Ida Lupino, et al. The plot revolves around a society matron (and owner of the local bank) who decides to rid the town of the "Mob" by putting together a "Mob" of her own. The results are hilarious as she and her gang go about their job with the help of an armored sedan (which drops tacks on the road to disable the pursuing police), machine guns, a jail-break and a bank heist. It's all great fun.There is a strange interlude when Bainter harangues the local dry cleaners who are being extorted by the bad mob. It smacks of patriotic propaganda and probably was intended as such since Hitler was running rampant in Europe at that point and the United States was still neutral.It all ends well.....the big boss is revealed, the bad mob is run out of town and Ida Lupino gets married to Lee Bowman, son of the lady of the mob. Sit back and enjoy this little-known gem of a film.

"There's never been a run on this bank !" -- Hattie Leonard.That's one of the tasty little nuggets of comedy which gets tossed about, seemingly in a most haphazard manner, in this excellent and user-friendly "gangster comedy," from 1939. In a very real sense, the writers and the director of this film were seeking to do something that is always difficult and sometimes impossible ... which is ... to make a social satire that has more laughs than bites.Consider that "The Lady and the Mob" is a window on a time before our times, before the cruelties and barbarities of World War Two, the Cold War, the Korean War, the Viet Nam War and the never-ending Gulf War, burned away all pretense of innocence from what was once called "the American Dream." Consider that Faye Bainter's character, Hattie -- and she is delightful in the goofiest possible ways -- lampoons the stuffy, hypocritical matrons so often created in the posh comedies of the 1930s.To call this a feminist film would be entirely wrong, and yet the strength of the satire, and the plot, lies entirely in the hands of Faye Bainter and Ida Lupino. Indeed, Ms. Ida Lupino gets a plum in this second billing, a role as juicy and sweet as her character is tart with her tongue ! Wealthy Hattie Leonard owns a bank and has a conscience, something most average people who lived during the 1930s and those Depression years probably could not believe -- unless they saw it in a motion picture ! One only has to see "Stagecoach" with John Wayne, Claire Trevor and John Ford directing, to understand how deeply-felt the animosity of "regular folks" was, towards bankers. Both of these films were released in the early part of 1939 and they both tell a tale of truthfulness about how badly damaged people can become decent again, and what it means to be "a True American".Since there is every prospect that Turner Classic Movies will run this fine, funny, film again soon, it would be spoiling things to give away much of the satirical plot of this comedy. Faye Bainter's classic looks and poise are a salute to all that's ever been the best about the actresses of the United States, and Ida Lupino plays her role cleverly. It is a definite mark of natural ability, as Ms. Lupino -- who is quite gorgeous at twenty-five -- darts in and out of the scenes with Bainter and "her Mob". The character actors selected to play Hattie's "stumble bums" are simply hilarious -- unless the viewer happens to know absolutely nothing about the 1930s and American slang.Even then, their comedic posturing works really well and is simply visually entertaining. This is a great little gem of a movie and while it does not quite carry the social and satirical "punch" of Frank Capra's "Lady for a Day," from 1933, it is well worth viewing, and for capturing on the digital video recorder to have on a lazy, rainy afternoon. Eight stars for comedy, satire, and snappy jokes.