Category: 1930s

I didn’t really get behind Pat O’Brien’s over zealous portrayal of Spot Cash Cutler the crooked auctioneer, but I did enjoy the heist-quality and double crossings in this story. O’Brien is stuck running auction scams on the lowly rubes of 2nd Avenue until 5th Avenue rich girl Claire Dodd pulls one on him and then convinces him to move on to richer fare. The ending is completely contrived and suspect, but the ride is cute and fun and not bad for its relatively short runtime.

Proclaiming that it is not meant to take sides, this film does not seem to live up to that promise. Richard Barthelmess is the intelligent son of a sharecropper. When the sharecropper dies from overwork, the plantation owner takes Richard under his wing and has him educated, mostly because of a push by his daughter Bette Davis. Richard is a bit old for the role as a young man torn between the community he was raised in and the people who helped him improve his station, but the film itself is not torn. The owners are one-dimensionally determined to hold on to any benefits and profits themselves, maintaining practices of usury that keep the tenants in debt to the grave and lynching anyone who dares to get in the way. It’s only through the threat of jail that they can be bribed to consider a profit sharing plan.

One thing that watching the remake so close to the original did was make me appreciate how closely they followed the original story in the other version. It makes it more interesting that they were able to cleanly reset the film into the 1980s Miami drug trade. Here in the original the setting is amongst Italian immigrants in Prohibition era Chicago, inspired by the life of Al Capone. Paul Muni is great in the title role, fully encompassing his single minded rise to the top of the Chicago crime world. Though it’s interesting to ponder how the film would have been different as effected as it was by the early days of the Hays Code, but I still found it plenty violent and effective as a gangster film.

In yet another entry in the ‘prisons are hellish nightmares’ series, this film has Richard Dix as a career criminal planning an escape from the brutal prison camp he currently inhabits. At the moment of egress, he discovers his young brother has recently been ensconced in the same camp. The film depicts the horrors of forced labor camps, here building the satirically named Liberty Highway, and the murderous results when the prisoners couldn’t perform. The ending is hokey and contrived, but the film isn’t bad beyond that. Plus Louise Beavers appears, albeit very shortly, in a non-maid role.

After coming into an inheritance, small town boy Eric Linden dreams of living it big in New York City. Unfortunately his free-wheeling cousin is more than happy to relieve him from the burdens of having so much cash. At a party thrown on his first night in the big city, someone winds up dead and he and his new love interest, Joan Blondell, find themselves on the lam. Luckily it’s a Pre-Code film and things aren’t always as dire as they seem. Joan is spunky and street-smart, passing on her wisdom and love of the city to the naïve Linden. It’s a quick paced little dramedy, that even includes Humphrey Bogart in a small role, where you can’t help but root for the cute kid while also cringing with every dollar he hands over to Cousin Gibby.

Technically Buster Keaton’s foray into talkies, this film is less a movie that stars Buster Keaton and more an MGM showcase that features him. Anita Page has just won a Kansas beauty pageant, so she, her mother, and Keaton as her agent are soon on a train to capture Hollywood. The fact that I can so easily describe the plot shows what a generic 1930s film this is and how out of their element the studio was in having Buster in their film. There are few physical gags, a whole lot of time is spent on a love story between Page and Robert Montgomery, there are musical numbers with no humor in them whatsoever and the end is just sad with little hope for a happy future for Buster’s character.

In the Hollywood Golden Age board game, Johnny Weissmuller is worth -1 point. I figured I owed it to the maligned Weissmuller to check out his most famous role. It is not without its problems. African locals are either treated as savages or spectacles. There is a lot of black face, including an entire race of people comprised of little people in black face. The entire reason Jane and her white compatriots are on the continent is to amass huge amounts of ivory from elephants and they, particularly her father played by C. Aubrey Smith, are willing to kill anything that even sort of gets in their way. Other than all that, it’s a fine, albeit a bit long, adventure film with loads of footage of real life jungle animals, including real Indian elephants with unfortunate attached ears and tusks. It also celebrates the advent of the iconic Tarzan call. That said, the film came in a set with three other Tarzan films and I don’t feel a desire to continue visiting the character.