There's Always a Woman (1938)

Melvyn Douglas has left the district attorney's office and gone on his own as a private detective, but times are so hard that he has to let go his secretary. Joan Blondell is his wife, but she wants to be his secretary and assistant. He decides to go back to work for the D.A., but Blondell decides to keep the office going on her own. She is dismantling the office when Mary Astor comes in as a client. She thinks her husband (Lester Matthews) is involved in an affair and wants a report on "the other woman" (Frances Drake). Blondell cons Douglas into taking her to the club where Astor and her husband and the other woman are dining so that she can look over the other woman. She sees Matthews pass a note to Drake, who then passes it to the club owner, Jerome Cowan. She also hears Robert Paige, Drake's fiancee, threaten to kill Matthews. Douglas and Blondell drink too much at the club, and as a result he oversleeps the next morning.

Next morning Blondell sees the headline in the paper saying that Matthews has been murdered. Douglas and his boss, Thurston Hall, see his picture in the paper in his underwear. Blondell is hired by Paige to prove his innocence. At home Douglas and Blondell fight, but she promises never to interfere again. The next evening Douglas and Hall have the primary players reenact the crime. Blondell hides and listens. Douglas finds the murder gun frozen in the refrigerator in the pantry of the butler, Walter Kingsford. They prove that the butler bought the gun, but he says he bought it for Paige. Paige admits that he had Kingsford buy the gun, but that it was stolen since then.

There is one hilarious moment when Douglas and Blondell are searching an apartment on the sly, and she turns on a loud radio, thinking it is a safe.

The plot twists and turns, and we eventually discover that Astor was the guilty party.

Frances Drake retired from acting after she married the Hon. Cecil John Arthur Howard, second son of the 19th Earl of Suffolk.




Matthews


Drake