Penthouse

Penthouse (1933)

A strange romance in a penthouse- a sky high love-nest! A girl from nowhere bringing drama that screamed from the headlines!

Gertie Waxted knows how notorious gangster Jim Crelliman runs his rackets, because she's long been under the hoodlum's thumb. She's secretly helping lawyer Jackson Durant in a snoop job aimed at pinning a murder on the thug. Her life will be in peril when that secret gets out.

Date of release
1933-09-08
TMDB
6.9 / 10 (21)
Runtime
1h 28m
Genres
Crime, Drama, Mystery
Director
W.S. Van Dyke

Casting

Interesting facts

Penthouse is a 1933 American pre-Code crime film starring Warner Baxter as a lawyer and Myrna Loy as a call girl who helps him with a murder case. The film features Charles Butterworth as Baxter's butler, Mae Clarke as the murder victim, Phillips Holmes as the suspected murderer, and C. Henry Gordon as the gangster who arranged the murder. It was directed by W. S. Van Dyke and written by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, based on a novel by Arthur Somers Roche. The film was later remade as the more sanitized Society Lawyer (1939), without the risqué pre-Code dialogue.

Production

The working title of Penthouse was "Penthouse Legend." Baxter was borrowed from Warner Bros. for the film. The film was the first pairing of Loy and director W. S. Van Dyke, who directed many of the Thin Man films which would make Loy a star. Penthouse screenwriters Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett wrote the screenplays for three of the six Thin Man films: The Thin Man (1934), After the Thin Man (1936), and Another Thin Man (1939).

After directing Penthouse, Van Dyke told MGM production boss Louis B. Mayer that Loy would be a big star if she continued to receive the right kinds of roles.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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