The Great Radio Caper: Dark, Film Noir Comedy

The picture is designed as a 1937 black-and-white film noir with extremely dry comedy. The city should feel elegant, wet, overbuilt, and morally underfunded. Night exteriors favor hard backlight, wet pavement, long shadows, glowing radio towers, and window blinds that seem personally disappointed in everyone. The newsroom is bright, smoky, frantic, and mechanically loud. WCRV is polished Art Deco on the surface and held together by extension cords, optimism, and fraud behind the walls. Humor should be played straight. Nobody pauses for a joke. Nobody signals that a line is funny. The darker the circumstance, the more professionally everyone behaves.Richard "Dick" Swingin dresses like a man who expects to be photographed leaving court. Evelyn Vale dresses like a woman who expects to own the courthouse by lunch. Their attraction is obvious to everyone except the two people involved. P. Enis Envy is never played as a fool. He is intelligent, charming, fast, and dangerous precisely because he can make terrible ideas sound like national virtues.