Considering the heavy-handed horseplay that Ford often included in his films as comic relief, the deftness of his touch in this masterful farce comes as something of a surprise. The old story of the worm turning is framed in the familiar form of the repressed character and his doppelganger, the evil twin. Ford directs and cuts the scenes with uncharacteristic rapidity, seeming to enjoy playing off the meek clerk against the anarchic gangster. One of the director's very few films set in a city, while not quite reaching for the expressionism of Vidor's The Crowd (1928), Ford nevertheless conveys a palpable sense of the oppressiveness of the workplace. Clearly, the villain here is not the gangster but a system which treats those trapped in its workings with contempt. He even goes so far as to visually rhyme the uniformity of the workers at their desks with the grim lines of hundreds of prisoners in uniform. Duty and conscience, often the director's themes, become slavery under these conditions. Mannion becomes a metaphor for Jones' need to escape. Robinson gives one of the best performances of his career in this little-known film, playing both parts with a subtlety that implied he understood Ford's intention perfectly. The inimitable Jean Arthur is wonderful, as always, as the co-worker the clerk is too shy to approach. Film historian and critic Jean Mitry described the film as "...wonderfully cut and mounted, supercharged, taut like a spring, it is a work of total perfection in its genre."