Fancy a Thin Man film, only with Ginger Rogers instead of Myrna Loy? Well this is pretty close. Powell plays Clay "Dal" Dalzell, a lawyer with a fancy Art Deco New York apartment, who likes his tipple and moonlights as a detective.
However, Rogers is not married to him (at least, at the start...), she's the rebellious daughter of someone fantastically rich who has been in love with Dal since she ran away from home at age 10 and hid in his closet. The plot, though, is pretty labyrinthine. Essentially, a friend of Dal's, Tim Winthrop,
tries to hire him to find his girlfriend who disappeared in Chicago a year ago. Dal is trying to turn him down politely when the two of them, along with Rogers' Donna attend the hot stage show "Midnight" that stars a masked singer called "Mary Smith". The minute he sees her Tim is convinced she is his missing girlfriend and he stands up and shouts "Alice!" This causes her to get befuddled and have to restart her song, and then she vanishes the minute she disappears backstage. Meanwhile, Donna has asked Dal to retrieve some letters from mobster Jim Kinland, and he leaves to do so before this whole incident. He manages to get them by letting Kinland know he has a canceled check of his that would reveal to the IRS that he owed a ton more taxes than he paid. (The minute he turns over the letters to Donna, she reveals that they're not hers, they belong to a married friend of hers, which suggests she really does love Dal and hasn't been dallying with other men.) There's also a gossip columnist in a big paper whom Dal has just convinced to quash a story, and whom Kinland suggests deserves bumping off. That evening Tim shows up in Dal's apartment, tells the story of Mary-is-Alice, and then there's a knock at the door. Dal suggests Tim hide in his "den" in case people have followed him here from the theater, but it turns out it's the columnist. However, somebody shoots him dead from the den just after he reveals that he has found out that Mary is Alice and is about to reveal why Alice went on the run. They also shoot Dal, but only get his "hip" (it's implied it's actually his ass) and when he goes into the den, it's empty. The next day (after being visited by Police Inspector Doremus (a calm and clever older cop with bad arches) and Sergeant Cleary (a sterotypical Irish-American hothead),
who will dog his steps thereafter, Dal gets a call from Tim who swears he was knocked out and removed from the den against his will. Dal, along with us, is skeptical. Oh, and there's also a couple, the wife of whom is a former flame of Dal's who has had many husbands, and whose current husband is the apparently tolerant Robert Classon, who reveals that he is a lawyer friend of somebody who has been falsely accused of a murder, and the person who could provide him with an alibi is the same missing Alice. Thensforth it's a roundabout of all parties, Tim, Dal and Donna (who team up to go sleuthing), the cops, Jim Kinland (who claims to be protecting Dal from "another party" because if Dal gets killed, the cops will find Kinland's check in his safe) and a mysterious masked woman, who may be Mary Smith. Things are finally brought to a head when Dal decides that the killer must be one of a list of suspects, all of whom he rings to tell them that he's found Mary, she's currently at a certain address, but will be heading over to his apartment in about an hour, at which time [current caller] should join both of them. His thinking is that all but the killer will show up later at Dal's apartment, while the killer will want to knock Mary off first, and will head immediately to the certain address, which is, of course, where Dal, who has equipped himself with a record player and a recording of Mary Smith singing, has been calling from. However, things don't go quite according to plan...
Not quite on a par with the best Thin Mans, but Powell is his usual suave self, and there's some solid lines of dialogue thrown around. Oh, and Dal's butler Swayne is good comic relief.
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