I'd have called this: "Manhattan Crap-o-rama", "Hollywood Melodrama" or "Bulls*** In Manhattan".<br /><br />A premise so insane that a great comedy could have been built around it. But a crime drama?! The story is so silly I had to laugh out loud on one occasion. Gable tries to save what can be saved, but Powell is so hopelessly uncharismatic and uninteresting - plus his role is an even more thankless one than that of the others - so he doesn't do the movie any good, which is nothing new. I'll never understand how a guy like Powell could ever have been a movie star. (Did he have someone's nude-with-hooker photos?) The film's main characters represent the height of Hollywood's preposterousness; Gable and Powell play two men who could only exist on planet Subirax 7G, provided that Subirax has a hallucinogenic atmosphere and is the sort of "unstable" planet the hippie-astronauts from "Dark Star" enjoy blowing up. Powell is an ultra-principled and morally incorruptible man. I.e.: he shouldn't be a prosecutor and a politician. Gable's sky-high principles are only slightly lesser than Powell's; Hollywood has certainly given us many crooks with-the-heart-of-gold but Gable has more morals than a Latin-soap priest. And in which America is it possible for a man to become prosecutor in spite of a highly publicized and proved close friendship with a mob guy, and even get elected governor in spite of not only still being pals with the mob guy but marrying his former girl?! Only in Subiraxian's Manhattan.<br /><br />The heights of lunacy are reached in the last third when one ludicrous plot-twist trips over the next. Powell demands that Gable get a death sentence, and Gable doesn't even get that upset; he becomes relaxed when Powell apologizes for having to be so rough in the court-room! Later, Powell gets a chance to reprieve Gable but he can't bring himself to do it. And when Loy tells him that Gable killed to help Powell's career, the latter decides that that makes it even more wrong to pardon him! (This is probably where I laughed.) Gable's behaviour before his execution is so over-the-top Subiraxian that it easily matches and rivals Cagney's behaviour in the similarly-premised "Angels With Dirty Faces" where Cagney also acts as if the electric chair is just a harmless Toys'R'Us plaything! After the execution, the very predictable - and very unintentionally funny - happens: Powell resigns, displaying the most exaggerated Hollywoodesque super-high morality patheticness that one can imagine.<br /><br />I found it interesting that Mickey Rooney (i.e. Mickey Mouse, for they are about the same size) plays the young Gable! I mean, the similarities are so striking! (Then again, on planet Subirax 7G adolescents change far more while they transform into adults.)<br /><br />Very ironic that this is the movie Dillinger sneaked out (or in) to see before he got shot; to risk one's life for such a dumb movie...