The sign on the newsroom wall says SILENCE, but the talk in Blessed Event never stops. Lee Tracy plays a tabloid hack (famously based on Walter Winchell) who rises from ad department clerk to celebrated columnist by dishing dirt about society lights expecting babies before the frosting hardens on the wedding cake and relentlessly trashing schmaltzy crooner/all-American heartthrob Dick Powell. His editor acknowledges that his tactics violate all rules of common decency, and his public taunting of mobsters gets him into dangerous situations, but don't expect Tracy's character to quit while circulation is up. Like all the great newspaper comedies of the thirties, this one crackles with the unbridled energy of American speech. When a high-toned daily runs an editorial denouncing him as “the absolute nadir” of sleazy journalism, our hero claims such phraseology “ain't English,” but he knows how to spell “phfft.”
—Juliet Clark