Street of Chance

Arnold Rothstein had been shot over a poker debt little more than a year before, and every audience in 1930 knew whose story this was. William Powell plays Natural Davis, the man who runs the city’s games and never shows a card he does not have to, three years before The Thin Man made him charming instead. Kay Francis is the wife who wants him out; Jean Arthur, very young, is the bride of the kid brother he is trying to cure of cards. Howard Estabrook’s script was nominated for an Academy Award. Watch Powell’s hands in the last game, and what he chooses to do with a winning one.