The Perfect Clue (1935) Review - A messy, fast-talking B-movie distraction

If you have seventy minutes to kill and love those dusty, fast-talking 1930s B-movies where everyone behaves like they just drank four cups of black coffee, then The Perfect Clue is actually a pretty fun ride.

But look, if you cannot stand spoiled rich girls screaming at their fathers or plots that make zero logical sense, you are going to hate this within five minutes. I promise you.

The whole thing starts because Mona (played by Dorothy Libaire) is mad that her rich dad is marrying some woman she detests.

So she does what any sane 1930s socialite does: she throws a massive tantrum and runs away using literally every vehicle she can find.

She ends up hiring this quiet guy named David (David Manners, who you might know as the incredibly bland hero from the original Dracula) to be her personal chauffeur.

The catch? He is an ex-con just trying to go straight. 🚗

I love how David Manners plays an 'ex-con' here.

He is so incredibly polite and well-groomed. He looks like he should be serving tea in a parlor, not doing hard time in a state penitentiary.

He has this incredibly soft voice that makes you wonder how he survived five minutes in a prison yard.

But anyway, they hit the road. It has that classic road-trip vibe, kind of like a very cheap version of It Happened One Night, which came out just a year before this.

You can totally see the filmmakers trying to copy that exact energy, but with about a tenth of the budget.

The romance between them develops because... well, because they are the two lead actors and they are in a car together. There is really no other reason.

She is incredibly annoying to him, and he mostly looks tired.

And then, out of absolutely nowhere, the movie decides it wants to be a gritty crime thriller. 🕵️‍♂️

Suddenly there is a crime syndicate boss. And then he gets murdered.

And guess who gets blamed? Yep, our polite ex-con chauffeur.

It is such a wild whiplash in tone. One minute they are bickering in a dusty ditch, and the next, we are dealing with police lineups and shady gangsters.

It reminded me a bit of City Streets, but without any of the gorgeous shadows or cool direction.

There is this one scene in a hotel lobby that is just hilarious.

The background extras are clearly just staring at the camera. One guy in a suit in the background literally walks into a pillar, stops, looks at it, and then walks around it like nothing happened. I had to rewind it twice just to make sure I saw it right.

Also, Mona's original fiancé, Ronnie (Skeets Gallagher), is the most useless character in cinema history.

He just sort of wanders around looking confused in a very nice hat.

The writing is credited to like four different people, which explains why the plot feels like two completely different scripts glued together with cheap tape.

But honestly? I did not mind it.

It has that cozy, scratchy black-and-white charm where the actors talk at lightning speed because they probably had to shoot the whole thing in four days.

The dialogue has some genuinely funny, weird lines. At one point, Mona says something about how her heart is 'like a flat tire,' which is just spectacular writing if you ask me.

Do not expect a masterpiece. It is just a goofy, fast little programmer from a time when movies were cranked out like sausages.

Some random things I wrote down:

• Mona's traveling outfit looks incredibly uncomfortable for running away in.
• Why does every cop in this movie sound like they are from Brooklyn, even though they are clearly in the middle of nowhere?
• The transition effects between scenes look like they were done with a cardboard slide.
• David Manners' hair remains absolutely perfect even after a car chase. Truly inspiring.

If you find it on YouTube or some weird streaming archive on a rainy Sunday, give it a go. It is short enough that even if you hate it, you did not lose your whole afternoon.