To me, this movie is perfection.

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

A Masterpiece!

Tells a fascinating and unsettling true story, and does so well, without pretending to have all the answers.

Here's the premise: A sweet old lady, indignant that local merchants are victims of an extortion ring, gets together her own mob to fight fire with fire. And how does she get them? Well, the district attorney, who knows and respects her, orders several criminals to be good boys and do what she says. And how does she deploy them? Well, she orders one to go into a shop and beat up the extortionist. And what happens? It's HER thug who gets carried out on a stretcher (he's ok almost at once)! Hilarious! Fantasies and fairy tales may have magic elements, but they have to be grounded in reality. How likely is it that the DA would do this? Or that the extortionist would not do the thug permanent damage? Or use a knife or gun? Damon Runyon's stories were called fairy tales of Broadway, but in them gangsters do use guns, and their victims don't get up once they're down. This movie is offensively patronising in its assumption that its viewers will laugh at anything and never think about what they're watching. Lee Bowman is, as usual, charming, and the young Ida Lupino is beautiful, though she looks even sulkier than in her later, tough-girl roles. It's easy to see why and to sympathise, but that lovely, sensitive actress Fay Bainter fares worse, buried under a ton of rubber and makeup and stuck in this insulting sharp-tongued but sweet, doddery but clever little old lady role.

A movie like this with its broad humor is mainly a matter of taste. A refined, uptown lady (Bainter) organizes her own mock mob in order to rid the city of a real mob of extortionists. Bainter's gang is made up of 'deeze' and 'doze' Runyonesque characters like Warren Hymer and Joe Sawyer. The laughs are supposed to come from their silly shenanigans, plus the unlikelihood of an uptown old lady leading a bunch of uncouth characters. Throw in Bowman and Lupino (before her drama queen days) as the required love interest and the format is complete. The movie does have its moments, particularly the castor oil treatment, while the aging Bainter does well in a very demanding role. The movie's pretty much a one-note comedic set-up, so you should know within the first 10-minutes whether to stay with it or not.

Lady and the Mob, The (1939) ** 1/2 (out of 4) Slight but mildly entertaining comedy about an elderly woman (Fay Bainter) who grows sick and tired of the gangsters taking over her city so she forms her own gang to run them out of town. This film runs just 65-minutes and for the most part it moves along pretty good, although the ending gets dragged out longer than it should have. Bainter is good in her role but a young Ida Lupino seems out of place and fails at all of her comedy scenes. Seeing as when this film was released, there's some big speeches about standing up for your country, taking down dictators and other things to that nature. Joe Sawyer plays one of the woman's gang members. Another interesting tidbit is that this Columbia picture also shows off another one of their films, You Can't Take It With You, during one scene.

This tidy, short little comedy starts with a romantic comedy premise: beautiful and young Ida Lupino (at the beginning of her career) has to visit her prospective mother-in-law from Hell, strong-willed Fay Bainter (at the height of her career and fame), who had broken all of her son's previous engagements. Bainter immediately begins treating Lupino as a secretary. But when Bainter learns that her dry cleaner, Henry Armetta, is being shaken down by a mob protective association, Bainter becomes determined to break the mob herself, and recruits her own mob to fight them. It's fast and funny, and has a delightful cast of character actors playing their tough-guy roles with their tongues firmly in their cheeks; its tone is captured in the telegraph Young sends to her fiancée, Lee Bowman, "Is there insanity in your family? Return at once."