Though on occasion he had a chance to play a good joe like Doctor Livesey in Treasure Island (1934), maybe he's best remembered for his appearances as a superficially pleasant fellow in such Hitchcock movies as 1941's Saboteur (supposedly Hitch didn't want him in that one, 'cause he thought he was an overly familiar nogoodnik by that time) or the society quack in Murder, My Sweet who feels superior to private detective Dick Powell and just about everyone else on the planet. Then there's his other well-remembered nice guy part from the sobfest Magnificent Obsession (1954) in which he has the thankless task of guiding Rock Hudson from the path of selfishness to enlightenment.
This afternoon I saw a movie starring Kruger (seen above with co-star Ben Lyon) called The Women in His Life (1933) that was unlike just about any other movie the guy ever played in. This is the second time I saw this, and as an acting--and maybe over-acting tour de force, it just knocked me out.
Kruger played an interesting, rather complex character who was a big shot NY lawyer who specialized in getting the guilty sprung and in his spare time occasionally went off the rails and drank himself into a stupor. He also tended to treat women--his clients and his staff--like kleenex. At least all but Una Merkel, whose faithful gal friday put up with him while voicing her concern for him. Isabel Jewell, who so often was relegated to small, insignificant parts in films, played the lawyer's most faithful girlfriend, who goes off to Florida with him on vacation despite his cavalier, even cold attitude. With her wounded puppy eyes, Isabel is probably the perfect choice for this part. The viewer can also never truly be sure if she's working an angle by being with Kruger or if she's really in love with him. Even she must wonder, since, as she says, whenever they're in a crowd, he looks at all the faces of the people "as though he's searching for a ghost".
Kruger gets to play a character who completely breaks down during the course of the film. In two scenes in particular, when he realizes that the woman he loved and married and who left him ten years before is dead, his sophisticated shell breaks along with a framed photo of his former wife that he crushes between his hands. It really looks as though it left the actor bleeding. He then goes off on a bender, which ends at a cemetery in utter despair, crying on her grave in the rain. Now normally I would've started laughing at such melodramatics, but Kruger does these scenes with such force and sense of reality, I was completely swept along by the conviction in his acting.
I don't want to spoil the ending of this movie for anyone by describing more of the plot, but this fast-paced movie, directed by George Seitz and well written by F. Hugh Herbert, (the screenwriter, not the comedian), packs a good plot and some outstanding acting into its brief running time of 75 minutes. I hope that you'll post your thoughts here if you saw this movie.
Btw, the presence of Roscoe Karns as Kruger's investigator is very amusing in his patented smart aleck way.
I love Isabel Jewell---she's aptly named, a wonderful, wonderful comedic performer and sweet here as a sympathetic girlfriend. 