Benedict Bogeaus tries to get bang for his buck with three stars in individual, though linked storylines. This has a pretty good basis for a film - Ann Harding is an old lady who wants to contact her three estranged sons. Reunited families works very well - look at say The Sons of Katie Elder. And the combination of George Brent, George Raft and Randolph Scott gives great contrast.
But it's a lousy movie. Very badly written. It's stuffed with plot - there is so much on, none of it interesting. It's like they took three separate films, truncated the scripts and stuffed them into this one. George Brent is a womaniser trying to marry for money who is loved by Joan Blondell; George Raft runs a nightclub in South America and tries to fight former Nazis and femme fetales; Randolph Scott is a rodeo rider who gets involved in an attempt to bust a baby adoption racker.WTF?
On top of this is the plot where Harding's relatives try to get her declared insane so they can get her money. If she was such a great mum why are they all estranged from her? Would Raft really have taken the fall for a weasel? so the brothers have nothing to do with each other?
I know Bogeaus wanted to shoot stories individually but it means we don't have many scenes of the brothers together, which should be part of the fun - and the stories tend to be back stories. This is a bad movie that annoyed me the more I watched it.
No comments:
Post a Comment