A good, informative and stimulating track. Jewell keeps the pace steady and offers a lot of good stuff about the movie in particular and its place in gangster and film noir cinema in general. His observations on the recurring visual and moral themes in the genre were the track's best part in my book.

I didn't give the commentary a grade above 8 because a couple of problems, such as Jewell's rather deterministic mindset, attibuting many creative decisions in the movie to "censorship" and the Production Code. I also found unjust on his part calling the movie "cinematic not that great", since one of my gut impression right from the beginning was that it used sound, editing and direction in a very fresh way for an early-30s movie. On the other hand, Jewell's view on the movie's supposed gay subtext was professional, analyzing it and then dismissing it as irrelevant.