The king of snappiness in classic Hollywood was New York’s own streetwise Raoul Walsh, born in 1887, who started out on Broadway, joined D. W. Griffith (for whom he played John Wilkes Booth in “Birth of a Nation”), and, in 1915, directed the raw and rowdy “Regeneration,” widely considered the first gangster feature, on location on the Lower East Side. In the early thirties, he made a pair of films—“Me and My Gal” (1932) and “The Bowery” (1933)—which crackle with the city’s slangy working-class wit and wile. It’s the latter one, set in the Gay Nineties, that fits into Film Forum’s series “1933: Hollywood’s Naughtiest, Bawdiest Year,” playing today on a double bill with Walsh’s “Sailor’s Luck,” set in the port of San Diego. None of the three films is available on DVD—and neither is his 1932 Western “Wild Girl,” which finds the same rough urbanism in a rustic California settlement. But here’s what is: the closest thing to it, Walsh’s 1936 crime comedy “Big Brown Eyes,” starring Cary Grant as Danny Dunn, a fast-talking, wisecracking New York police detective, and Joan Bennett as Eve Fallon, a barbershop manicurist and Dunn’s on-and-off girlfriend.

The barbershop where Eve works is the center of town, where criminals, cops, and journalists meet, joust, and flirt with the help. The story turns on a jewel theft and an insurance investigator who turns out to be in on the job; as the band of criminals comes into conflict, gunplay in Central Park leaves a baby dead, and Dunn is put on the case. Meanwhile, through a silly misunderstanding, Eve slams the door on him and, with her gift of gab and ear for gossip, talks her way into a job at a newspaper and leans on the levers of the press to help catch the shooter.

It’s got a zippy array of colorful characters, including an effete criminal kingpin (Walter Pidgeon) who plays classical piano and plots with crude co-conspirators in the cushy calm of an art museum (“Rubens—is that the same guy that’s got the restaurant in Broadway?”); his unlettered underling, Cortig (“There was only one eyewitness and the name is withheld.” “What kind of a name is that?” “And she is being held in-communi-cadoo.”); the glad-handing Teflon crook Benny Battle, with his catch greeting, “Hahsit, Babe”; and the inevitable barbershop colleague named Myrtle (Doris Canfield). Grant, without shedding his English accent, scrapes some of the chrome off his manners and uses a goofy ventriloquism number to open some doors. The movie’s scant hour and seventeen minutes features a courtroom battle (including a sardonic look at the unofficial circuit of favors on which the legal system actually runs, as well as a glimpse of asphalt vigilante justice) and, of course, sex and its eternal price tag (as one glad-hander spends hundreds of 1936 dollars to ply Eve with perfume and candy while offering to set her up in luxury as a kept woman).

The dialogue recycles clichés with ricochets (“So long, Toots; don’t take any brass knuckles.” “If I do, I’ll use them on you.”) and moves at the hectic pace of serendipitous fortune and sudden calamity, accelerated and amplified by the blare of a media capital. Walsh may offer a conservative and sedimental, as well as sentimental, view of New York—but it also comes off as a roiling, boiling cauldron of constant change and endless possibility. The title “Way Down East” may be Griffith’s; but, for Walsh, the city remains an open field, a frontier closed in on itself.