More Murder Solved By Reporters:

Clark Gable Between Big Pictures: After Office Hours (1935)

Clark Gable runs neutral here just ahead of major hits that would consolidate him as Hollywood's King. Constance Bennett gets favored billing, a contractual if not earned distinction. Fast-talker newshounds are wedded to murder detection, blending It Happened One Night with The Thin Man. Genre-mixing was figured to mix patronage as well, a frothy please-everyone blend, After Office Hours being what fan mag readers loyally turned out for after page-glimpse of synopsis or stills. Hundreds of the latter spewed from minor-est of star vehicles, a cast laying aside days to sit/stand for them. Stills, after all, had to be posed and lit as carefully as action for a finished film. Teaming of Bennett with Gable was fulfillment of long-held desire stoked by quarter or less priced periodicals sold at drug and notion check-out by clerks who wished they were Bennett or Gable. Less frequent, meaning choosier, moviegoers would wait for truly special Mutiny On The Bounty, the sort of event to supply momentum for fluff along After Office lines.

Let's You and Him Fight!, says Connie, as I Sit Wondering Seventy-Eight Years
Later If Gable Ever Took Home Neat Wardrobe He Donned In MGM Pics.

It was strategic placement of expensive specials that kept filler like After Office Hours on a paying basis, Mutiny for instance needing $1.9 million to complete, while AOH was managed for negative costs of only $366K. After Office Hours was a sort of programmer you'd see in 1935 when going out to a movie mattered more than what movie they played. Not a few patrons would pass under a marquee for the ticket window without even looking up at what was on. After Office Hours was for this kind of audience. Much of 72 minutes is Gable/Bennett spooning, what his matinee idolaters were primarily there for, but noteworthy is screenplay credit for Herman J. Mankiewicz, focused on a press story as he'd later be with Citizen Kane. Are there hints of CK themes to come? Not that I could discern, and based on unremarkable Mankiewicz result, it's tougher to argue Pauline Kael's case that HM, and not Welles, was Kane's truest author. Gable's unmasking of Hours' killer involves leap of faith laughable on close inspect, though logic being lowest priority makes all that a moot point.