Misbegotten M-G-M programmer, running less than an hour (a sure sign the studio knew they had a stinker), taken from a modest B’way success directed & co-written by George Abbott with Muni Weisenfrend (later Paul Muni*) as a Lower East Side Jew, home after five years in jail and trying to stay clear of his protection-racket pals. Bizarrely cast as a (now lost) silent in ‘28 with John Gilbert & teenage Joan Crawford, we now get patrician Franchot Tone & reasonably cast Karen Morley sharing a tenement flat with unlikely Yiddishe Mama May Robson who lights the Sabbath Candles & keeps the gefilte fish on ice. If only upstairs neighbor Gladys George stuck to mob boyfriend Jack La Rue instead of pinning her hopes (and various appendages) on Tone. A fight on the roof; a crumbling brick barrier; a five story fall (the one good shot in the pic); a wronged dame your only alibi against a murder rap. Easy to find cast & crew for something like this over @ Warners, but hopeless @ M-G-M. Here, painfully inept megging from Paul Sand (who he?); and Franchot, on the verge of a career defining 1935 (MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY; LIVES OF A BENGAL LANCER; marriage to Joan Crawford), wondering how he got this assignment.
ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Also in the cast on B'way, future acting teacher legends Lee Strasberg & Sanford Meisner.
WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK: Gary Cooper on Franchot Tone: ‘I’ve been with some good ones, but maybe the best was Franchot Tone. I made two pictures with him & he stole both of them. Something went wrong with how he was handled; or who knows, maybe it was Joan Crawford. But he had everything – great at comedy and also at serious stuff if given the chance. Now LIVES OF A BENGAL LANCER is one hell of a picture, but you could take me right out of it and it would still be one. But it couldn’t be much without Tone.’ https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/01/lives-of-bengal-lancer-1935.html
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