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Saturday, April 10, 2021

THE CONQUERORS (1932)

Manly silent film star Richard Dix was a top R.K.O. asset in Early Talkies, especially post-CIMARRON/’31, a prestige hit from an Edna Ferber novel covering three-generations, Taming the West with newspapers.  Dix couldn’t have known he’d peaked, gently falling into B-pics in a few years, but here he’s still heading West, if without Ferber’s sharp aim, now Taming the West thru banking.  Banking?  Actually, quite the daring choice for a hero’s occupation in 1932.*  Ann Harding takes over as consort from CIMARRON’s Irene Dunne, and a shorter running time means one or two tragic events per reel.  Exhausting!  (It also lets Dix play his own grandkid.)  But with a jumpy script and William Wellman’s direction, over-stuffed & underdeveloped, nothing holds us as it did for Wesley Ruggles in CIMARRON, which had a homemade, clunky quality that made things stick.*  This one best for supporting characters like Guy Kibbee’s loopy, likeable Doc and eccentric Edna May Oliver as his noisy, understanding wife.  Plus a series of clever visual transitions covering three boom-to-bust economic catastrophes from montage specialist Slavko Vorkapich, copied over at Warners in 1939 for THE ROARING TWENTIES.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK: *Some dialogue during a bank run anticipates IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE/’46, but a Frank Capra pic from this year, AMERICAN MADNESS, makes a better comparison, and shows how to make a bank manager your film's hero in 1932 as well as demonstrating the advanced film technique that shook Hollywood into its Golden Age.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/03/american-madness-1932.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *With the notable exception of a mass family lynching, sadistically effective as shot by Wellman in unexpurgated Pre-Code fashion.  (Note it’s an all-white affair.)

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