One of the Great Unsung Sports Movies of All-Time
***MINOR SPOILERS***A really fun Paramount pre-code starring Jack Oakie, William Collier Sr and Warren Hymer as the three leads (for some reason Hymer is billed 8th but he's one of the main characters and gets a good chunk of screen time).
Fight manager Doc Williams (Collier) takes his boys wrestler Brassie Randall (Hymer) and boxer Eddie Burke (Jack Oakie) to Madison Square Garden from San Francisco to train at the Garden and get them some high- profile fights. Along the way the boys get mixed up with racketeers and a crooked manager that leads to a rousing finale where the good guys defeat the bad guys and Oakie gets the girl (Marian Nixon).
This film is partly a historical record of MSG and the sports world during the early 1930s and it's a lot of fun seeing guys like Mike Donlin, Stanislaus Zbyszko, Tom Sharkey, Tommy Ryan, Tod Sloan and JACK JOHNSON as themselves. Also seen in a cameo is sports writer Damon Runyon as himself in one of his very few appearances on film.
The other fun part is watching actors like Oakie, Collier, and Hymer interacting so naturally with one another that you could believe these three characters have a solid familial bond. One of the best scenes is when Eddie and Brassie decide to break with Doc so Doc can have his dream job as matchmaker of the Garden. Warren Hymer is particularly good in this scene when he makes the difficult decision to follow Oakie's lead by walking out on their manager.
It's a real shame that this film hasn't been seen on television since the mid-1960s. Universal controls the Paramount pre-1949 film library and in this digital age should make more of their films, like this one, accessible to classic film fans.
score 8/10
darkcollins 14 May 2017
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw3707965/36064
Pages:
[1]