MartinHafer
Steve (Robert Taylor) is a gambler and his buddies are all gangsters. While he has a nice-guy persona, he's one of them and makes money rigging various sporting events and it's an ugly business. In the midst of this comes a nice lady, Toni (Virginia Bruce) and the two soon fall for each other. However, she doesn't know about Steve and her family's business interests and Steve eventually has a problem with his conscience. He loves her but his friends are killers and thugs. What to do?This is an okay movie but could have been a lot better and more biting. But, inexplicably, the film has a musical interesting, Pinky, who has absolutely no reason to be in the film and he's a completely lightweight character--and has no place in a film that should have had a lot more noir. Additionally, the ending really was too idealistic and difficult to believe. All in all, a decent set up but a dissatisfying conclusion.
mark.waltz
Sounding like a glamorous MGM drawing room comedy, "Times Square Lady" is so totally the opposite as it deals with the death of a criminal and the revelation that the heir to his nightclub is a daughter he barely knew brought up by her late mother's relatives in Iowa. When this glamorous young lady arrives, society takes notice, and the gangsters who wanted to get control of his club go after her like a dog attacking a steak. She attracts the attention of the very handsome Robert Taylor who isn't as involved in organized crime as the rival gangsters but is already engaged to the shady Helen Twelvetrees. Pretty much nothing happens in the film's 67 minutes that couldn't have been summed up in one of those "Crime Does Not Pay" shorts, and too much time is given to country bumpkin Pinky Tomlin to sing "The Object Of My Affection" over and over. Frankly, I'd rather hear Carl "Alfalfa" Switzer sing it in that memorable "Our Gang" short.Nat Pendleton adds buffoonish comedy as Taylor's driver, and really surpasses the line of stupidity when he sticks his smiling head out of a window, looking back at shooting gangsters chasing them. Isabel Jewell adds a bit of amusing comedy as the manicurist whom Bruce hires as her secretary/companion, but for the most part, this feels like an amalgamation of bits and pieces of every crime drama already made and totally overloaded with stereotypes. Taylor and Bruce make an attractive couple, but its just a shame that they didn't have a screenplay that was a bit fresher and didn't feel like it was thrown together with pages torn apart from older scripts.
Martha Wilcox
There is nothing to commend this film. They call it a movie, but it fails to provide any engaging characters or compelling story. The script is poorly written, and the comedy in the film is just not funny. It's one of those films that has not stood the test of time and has become hard to find simply because it's not good. It comes nowhere near the quality of Robert Taylor's later films. His 1930s films are of a poor quality, and there is no star quality in any of them to indicate what he would become later in his career. I would say to all Taylor fans to stay away from this film as it provides no entertainment value nor is Taylor's performance up to the standard of what we would expect.
bkoganbing
Though he was hardly a name to put above the title as yet, Robert Taylor's first film in which he is first billed is Times Square Lady. He plays a Broadway sharpie who used to work for an entertainment/sports tycoon who has just died and left the whole enterprise to his daughter, Virginia Bruce. From what is described in the film, Virginia's father was a combination of Tex Rickard and Billy Rose.He's left all kinds of businesses to his daughter, including a nightclub that Taylor runs. The rest of the gang consists of such various types of Hollywood villainy as Henry Kolker, Russell Hopton, Raymond Hatton, and Jack LaRue. The idea is for these guys to low ball the success and future prospects, get Bruce to sell to them and then turn around and sell the whole package to a rival promoter. Taylor's job is to romance Bruce which he undertakes and that of course is not seen in a good light by his girlfriend, Helen Twelvetrees.The romance angle was easy for Taylor as he and Virginia Bruce were involved at the time. Virginia Bruce was in the process of getting divorced from John Gilbert when she and Taylor were kanoodling. Taylor does a fine job in the role, that major stardom was in his future was not even questioned.But more than a big step up in Robert Taylor's career, Times Square Lady is the film in the song The Object Of My Affection was introduced by Pinky Tomlin who also wrote part of the lyric. This is an enduring classic, still as popular today as it was back then. Why it wasn't nominated in that second year of the Best Song category is a mystery.A key film in the rise of a great career and an enduring popular song, most films don't have either of those things to their credit.
AD
