Another film from a pretty vanilla Criterion Channel collection: office romances. Last night I watched John Ford's 1935 film The Whole Town's Talking. I'm a big John Ford fan, but I didn't know how long he had been making movies. Like a lot of folks I always link him to 1939's Stagecoach, and the beginning of his pairing with John Wayne, but by 1939 he had already been making films since 1917. This includes a ton of silent films, which, sadly, like most silent films, have been lost. The Whole Town's Talking stars Edward G. Robinson playing two roles, the timid company employee Arthur Ferguson Jones and the ruthless gangster "Killer" Mannion. I was impressed by Ford's ability to get both characters in the same scene considering the limitations of special effects in the mid-30s. I liked the film, although they didn't do nearly enough with Plattsburgh's own Jean Arthur (playing Wilhelmina Clark), who was such a firecracker and who routinely stole every scene in every movie she was ever in.
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