This Is My Affair (1937) Review - Stanwyck and Taylor are Great

If you have eighty minutes to spare tonight and want some cozy, slightly silly historical crime drama, This Is My Affair is actually a pretty fun watch. It's perfect for anyone who loves Barbara Stanwyck looking incredibly glamorous while singing in a smoky saloon, but if you want actual historical accuracy about the McKinley administration, you will probably end up throwing a shoe at your screen. 📺

The setup is so wonderfully melodramatic. Robert Taylor plays this Navy lieutenant named Perry who gets personally hired by President McKinley—yes, that McKinley—to go undercover and bust a bank robbing ring.

He has to pretend to be a disgraced officer to get into the gang. Its a classic trope, but Taylor plays it with this earnest, puppy-dog intensity that makes you root for him even when his disguise is basically just wearing a slightly wrinkled hat. 🤠

Then he meets Lil, played by Stanwyck, who is a singer at this fancy saloon.

The camera basically drools over Stanwyck when she first appears on stage. You can tell the director was absolutely in love with her face, and honestly, who can blame him?

She has this incredible, sharp energy that elevates every single scene she is in. It reminds me a bit of the rough-around-the-edges charm you get in older seafaring melodramas like Sal of Singapore, where the romance feels a bit dirty and real despite the Hollywood polish.

But then Victor McLaglen shows up as Jocko, her overprotective "brother" (spoiler: he wants to be way more than a brother). McLaglen is basically a walking brick wall in this movie—lots of shouting, chest-puffing, and looking like he wants to eat the scenery.

There is this one hilarious scene where McLaglen and Taylor just stare at each other for what feels like three minutes. The silence is so heavy you expect them to start laughing, but they just keep frowning.

The plot gets really wild when McKinley gets assassinated.

Because McKinley was the only guy who knew Perry was undercover. Talk about bad timing!

Suddenly our hero is on death row, and nobody believes he is actually a good guy.

The movie shifts from a fun saloon romance to this incredibly tense race against the clock.

I did notice that the background music gets incredibly loud during the jail scenes. Like, distractingly loud, to the point where I had to turn down my speakers because the trumpets were blasting my ears off. 🎺

Also, John Carradine is in this for about five minutes as a creepy politician, and he does that thing where he looks like a giant, angry bird. He is always great at being unsettling.

It is not a masterpiece like some of the artistic silent films of the era—think The Adventures of Prince Achmed with its beautiful shadows—but it knows exactly what it wants to be.

A few weird details I couldn't stop thinking about:

• Robert Taylor's hair stays perfectly parted even after he gets into a massive fistfight.
• The guards in the prison are hilariously slow to react to anything. One guy literally looks at an open door, blinks, and then just stands there.
• The sheer amount of cigar smoke in the saloon scenes is enough to give the viewer second-hand asthma.

By the time the final escape plan starts happening, you are totally hooked. It's just a solid, fast-paced thriller with two massive stars who have actual chemistry. Definitely put this on your watchlist if you want some easy, comforting classic cinema.