Me and My Gal is the perfect title for this fresh, asymmetric film, so vivid and un­balanced, one of the rarities that our ret­rospective is proposing, almost unknown to audiences outside of the States and deeply admired by the most influential film critics. Me and My Gal, and that is about all. Of course, there is a harried parallel plot of gangsters returning from the past of a brunette secretary who then gets involved in a bank heist, but even that story gets overshadowed by what really counts: the heated skirmishes and saucy banter between the cop played by Spencer Tracy and the clerk, Joan Bennett. Walsh indulges Tracy from the first scene to the last – conceding a long, splendid, mean­dering opening, which defines a brusque, good-hearted, sharp-witted character. 191 When he gets promoted from dockside cop to detective, it is because he saved a barfly from drowning just after a round of verbal jousting (“Go back to your wife!” “But I’m not married!” “What a lucky lady…”). Bennett, for her part, is all an allusion, a snappy wisecracking, a pro­vocative gum-chewing, she’s a mischie­vous sharp-shooter with a wavy blond bob. There are moments in this movie where the mastery of the dialogue and the witty theatre of desire are in perfect harmony with the best romantic comedies of the early 1930s – with an added experimen­tal fervor. I will limit myself to mentioning the scene in which, as their two bodies are glued together on the sofa in a way that a fully working Hays code would have never allowed on screen, Tracy and Bennett talk about themselves and their dreams while their off-camera voices recount what the two of them are really thinking – almost exactly as Woody Allen would do a half-century later in Annie Hall. And I will leave the word to the great American film critic and artist, Manny Farber: “In 1931 he di­rected his best film, Me and My Gal, an unpredictable jauntiness built around a dubious theme: ‘Life is sunny, if you don’t stir it up’. A suspended moment of grace for Walsh and Tracy, when newness and budding maturity were clicking for them […] It is only fleetingly a gangster film, not quite outrightly comic: it is really a portrait of a neighbourhood, the feeling of human bonds in a guileless community, a lyrical approximation of Lower East Side and its uneducated, spirited stevedore-clerk-shopkeeper cast. Walsh, in this lunatically original, festive dance, is nothing less than a poet of the American immigrant”.
(Paola Cristalli)