Fascinating . . . and very odd. With his career in tatters after two Marlene Dietrich flops, a brief sojourn at Columbia to modest results, and a disastrous train wreck on his aborted U.K. production of I, CLAUDIUS, director Josef von Sternberg landed at hidebound M-G-M (of all studios) assigned to a B+ programmer with Wallace Beery (of all stars), in one of his late, sleepy sentimental vehicles. Here, he’s a good natured cop-on-the-beat who not only picks up stray foundlings, but adopts them. Yikes! And so it goes for a couple of reels. Then things get interesting. We jump 15 years ahead to find birth son Alan Curtis working as a new cop on the old beat, but with none of Dad's good nature or instincts. In fact, the spoiled bully Curtis was as a teen has curdled into grown up pathology, a cop who's happy to shoot a punk kid in the back. His young wife (Laraine Day, another one of Beery’s foundlings, rapturously shot by Sternberg & brilliant lenser John Seitz) forgives him; so too the other foundling, adopted kid brother Tom Brown. Even Dad forgives him, but with a heavy heart knowing this could have been avoided. Then things really start to spin out of control with more killings: a mob guy; a good cop. Curtis is on the lam and the wife in labor when a despairing Beery sets a trap with the just born boy of his own bad seed son-of-a-cop. And while it’s admittedly a bit too much, Sternberg shows tremendous energy and even gets a real piece of acting out of Beery. Sternberg obviously trying to play ball with the powers that be at Hollywood’s biggest, most powerful studio. The film, which is in beautiful shape, could be the work of no one else. (And it's surely no more ridiculous as drama then BLONDE VENUS/’32.) Usually treated as an afterthought, the film, if hardly essential, is not for compleatists only. In some ways, it’s a throwback to UNDERWORLD, the Ben Hecht story that led Sternberg to create the modern mob pic back in 1927.
DOUBLE-BILL: As mentioned above, UNDERWORLD.
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