AllMovie

Frank Tuttle is mostly remembered today for his thrillers, including This Gun for Hire and Gunman in the Streets, but early in his career he was more of a generalist, and his work included a fair amount of comedy. Miss Bluebeard is a prime example, a breezy bedroom farce about a case of mistaken identity and misunderstanding that entails a set of romantic entanglements worthy of William Shakespeare. There's not a serious frame anywhere in it, and even 80 years later it plays about as well as the most charmingly light musicals of the 1930s and '40s, even as a silent. One can also see the elements of visual style, in the way that men and women react to each other -- and respond to being in each other's spaces -- that helped make Tuttle's thrillers so successful in the decades to come. The only problem for modern viewers will be that the extant sources for this movie tend to be on the grainy side, but the acting and shooting are so good and the direction so finely textured and nuanced that one can easily get past that technical impediment.