Before finding his ideal genre – sunny and exotic adventure films – where he would triumph in the Fifties, Edward Ludwig, one of the most misunderstood figures in Hollywood, played at length with a variety of genres. Between 1932 and 1944, many of his films (such as The Man Who Reclaimed His Head, from 1934, and The Man Who Lost Himself, from 1941) bore witness to his lively taste for the unusual, as well as to his indecision as to which sort of film best suited him. Adventure in Manhattan is the most successful of his works known to us from this period. Ludwig’s chosen context (though it was only a pretext) was the world of exuberant, chatty journalists, so dear to Columbia during the Thirties. He added in the conditions for a fake American comedy, which was in turn a fake crime comedy. […] Ludwig managed to drag the audience along with him, an audience curious and ecstatic over his blitheness, over the odd sobriety of a great narrator.

Jacques Lourcelles, Dictionnaire du cinéma. Les films, Paris, Robert Laffont, 1992