The stars of 'Corsair' give strong performances, but are let down by a flawed script

Corsair (1931)
Starring: Chester Morris, Thelma Todd (as Alison Loyd), Frank McHugh, Mayo Methot, Fred Kholer, Ned Sparks, and Emmett Corrigan
Director: Roland West
Rating: Six of Ten Stars

It's Prohibition Era America. John Hawks (Morris), a one-time college football star grows angry and disgusted with the predatory business practises of his investment banker boss (Corrigan), and the way his boss's daughter, Alison (Todd), seems to treat him like her property and possible living sex doll, he decides to turn the tables on them by becoming a predator himself: Teaming up with the mistreated and disgruntled employees (Sparks and Methot) of bootlegger Big John (Kohler), with whom the banker is secretly in business, Hawks launches a pirating operation geared toward intercepting Big John's shipments and selling the stolen booze to the investment banker, thus making him pay for the same illicit goods twice.

As the summary above might indicate, "Corsair" is a complicated story. It is full of twists and turns and reversals. Some of these are surprisingly tragic. It's also a story that's populated with great characters... but, unfortunately, the most important of these characters are not developed to their full potential--the two main characters, John Hawks and Alison Corning.

Thelma Todd is best remembered today for her roles in comedies, but she proves in "Corsair" that she could tackle dramatic roles with just as much effectiveness. Her man-eating character in this film is so cold and self-assured that she doesn't even try to hide her dark heart and lusts. While watching the film, I had the sense that Todd's character was more than just a spoiled rich girl with a wild and independent streak, but was actually a sociopath or perhaps even a psychopath.

Unfortunately, we never see enough of Todd interacting with other characters to really know if my interpretation of her is right or wrong. She comes onto Hawks, who sees her for what and who she is and rebuffs her advances again and again. This only makes her come at him harder, and it's what eventually puts her in the middle of Hawks piracy operation, and everyone in danger (including herself and her feckless fiance).

Speaking of John Hawks, as mentioned, his character is woefully underdeveloped. We know he's an ex-football star, we know he's a man of high morals and is willing to stand by those morals... but it's never made obvious why he goes to the extremes he does, becoming a pirate with the express purpose of robbing a powerful and dangerous bootlegger just so he can stick it to a rich banker who happens to have a sociopathic daughter who set her sights on him. Maybe something happened between  Alison and John during the months he worked for her father that we aren't privy to, or maybe John saw more dirty dealings on the part of his employer beyond hard-selling little old ladies on risky investments that made more money for the firm than for them? Who can say, because there's nothing in the film to give a clearer reason for why John does what he does.

This lack of depth to John and Alison, or any dimension to their relationship with each other, makes them boring lead characters, and it causes them to be overshadowed by John's "insiders" in the bootlegger's operation--a couple, Sophie and Slim (played by Mayo Methot and Ned Sparks), who help John rob their boss because their cut will allow them to escape the yoke of crime they are laboring under. Methot, for example, has a couple of really effective scenes that deftly define her character's motivation, her relationship with Sparks, as well as inspire a great deal of sympathy from the viewers. If only Todd or Morris had been given such well-crafted scenes to perform.

Aside from the underdeveloped main characters, "Corsair" is mostly an excellent film. It's a different sort of gangster movie that's beautifully and creatively filmed--with some surprisingly modern-seeming techniques given that this is a film from 1931, from a director whose career was over at this point--and it delivers tension and suspense found all-too-rarely in the B-pictures of this period.

I say "mostly excellent" because the great parts of the film are sandwiched between absolute dreck. The opening scene is dragged out and annoying because the filmmakers obviously and clumsily try to conceal Thelma Todd's identity for as long as they could--she made this film under what was supposed to be her "new stage name", so I suspect they were going for a Big Reveal and failed. And the film's finish is absolutely awful and out of step with the rest of the movie. I won't say anything more, for risk of spoiling it, but Morris and Todd's final scene together is perhaps one of the worst bits of cinema the public has ever been subjected to.

All in all, the good in "Corsair" outweighs the bad, and I think it's worth checking out for anyone who likes 1930s crime dramas. It's also worth watching for the performances given by Ned Sparks and Mayo Methot, as well as those of Chester Morris and Thelma Todd. In each case, we get to see them play types of roles that they were rarely seen in... and they get to show that they were actors with greater range than their professional pigeon-holes allowed them to show. (One can only imagine how great Morris and Todd could have been if they had been graced with the sort of material that Sparks and Methot had to work with.)




Trivia
Alison Loyd is better known as Thelma Todd. This was the one and only time she used that "stage name", reportedly at the urging of her boyfriend, director Roland West, and a numerologist who claimed it would help her career.

Also, this was the first film role for Mayo Methot. She would go onto have a minor film career that would be over by 1940, thanks to her alcoholism and bad temper. (Once, in a drunken rage during her short marriage to Humphrey Bogart, she threatened him and dinner guests with a loaded gun.)

Finally, "Corsair" was director Roland West's last movie. His career had been waning since silent movies fell out of favor, and in 1934 he went into business with Thelma Todd as co-owner of a cafe. Following her death in 1935, he broke for good with everything Hollywood related. 

This 'Conspiracy' isn't worth uncovering

Conspiracy (1930)
Starring: Bessie Love, Ned Sparks, Hugh Trevor, Gertrude Howard, Rita La Roy, and Donald MacKenzie
Director: Christy Cabanne
Rating: Four of Ten Stars

After killing a drug kingpin, Margaret (Love) is hiding from both the drug syndicate and the police, her identity as the killer still unknown. Then a crime writer turned amateur detective, "Little Nemo" (Sparks), decides to solve the case, gets onto her trail, and may expose her to cops and crooks alike.

When I reviewed "The Sawdust Ring", I said that I could easily see why D.W. Griffith was sure Bessie Love was going to be a star from the moment he first saw her, and why she did indeed become a huge star during the 1920s. In that film, she had a certain charisma that almost seemed to make her leap off the screen. In "Conspiracy", however, very little of that aura is evident... in fact, the performance she gives here barely distinguishes her from a generic "damsel in distress"-type character. (I might even argue that her performance seems a bit off, since she's playing a character who's been undercover with a drug gang for several months. Sure, she's just stabbed someone to death as the film starts, and later she's been cooped up with an obnoxious asshole for two weeks, but I would still expect something more than confusion and panic to each and every situation she encounters.)

Perhaps Love was modulating her performance to be complimentary to the boring, bland stock hero played by Hugh Trevor. Maybe she was trying to be lowkey so Ned Sparks' supremely annoying, grumpy old man character would seem even more annoying and grumpy. Or maybe she knew she was in a badly directed third-rate movie with a weak script full of squandered opportunities and only one mildly interesting twist, and she wasn't giving it her all. Whatever the reason, there are only two times in "Conspiracy" where we see glimmers of the Love that graced the screen 15 years earlier: During the obligatory insta-romance-sparking scene where she tells her tale of woe to Trevor's dull alleged man of action, and during the scene where Sparks' character threatens to turn her over to the police, and she in turn threatens to bash his brains in with a paperweight.

Still, even if Love had given the performance of her career, she probably couldn't have saved this movie which leads with its very best scenes and then steadily goes down hill. The biggest problem here, really, is that the filmmakers couldn't decide if they were making a comedy or a thriller or a melodrama; or if the central character was Margaret, Love's caught-in-the-middle woman on the run; Little Nemo, Sparks' annoying and obnoxious and played-strictly-for-laughs crime writer; or Trevor's boring feature section reporter. It also doesn't help the movie that anything remotely suspenseful happens off-screen or in a flashback (where we already know the outcome).

As terrible as this movie is, and as disappointed as I was with Bessie Love's performance, I did keep watching. Ned Sparks as Little Nemo was entertaining in a train-wreck sort of way... and I watched with captivated awe while Sparks and Gertrude Howard (as Little Nemo's beleaguered black housekeeper) played through a series of comedic (but extremely unfunny) and deeply racist exchanges. Also, Rita La Roy's femme fatal-ish character that shows up at about the halfway point as an agent of the drug ring trying to milk Little Nemo for information and seduce him into turning Margaret over to the gang when he finds her, was a lot of fun.

Unless you're a huge Ned Sparks fan (I think this was the closest this accomplished character actor ever came to playing the lead); want an opportunity to be able to tell exactly how brilliant Bessie Love is in some of her other roles; or are looking for an old movie with some racists scenes to fill you with righteous outrage, there are far better movies to spend your time on. (But if you do decide to check it out, I recommend you watch it for free on YouTube.)

'The Wide Open Spaces' is filled with funny

The Wide Open Spaces (1931)
Starring: Dorothy Sebastian, Ned Sparks, Antonio Moreno, and George Cooper
Director: Arthur Rossen
Rating: Eight of Ten Stars

A corrupt sheriff (Sparks) will go to any lengths to destroy the romance between the lovely Miss Rose (Sebastian) and the dashing John Smith (Moreno).

"The Wide Open Spaces" is a short film that lampoons just about any and every trope of westerns from the silent film and early talkies era that you can think of. It starts with a series of sight-gags and jokes revolving around gun-happy townsfolks, transitions into a series of gags based around the stereotypical wild west saloon, and ultimately settles into a spoof of melodramas with a love triangle involving the tough-as-nails-but-sexy saloon girl Rose (played by Dorothy Sebastian with perfect comedic timing), the crooked Sheriff Jack Rancid (played by Ned Sparks who does everything but twirl his mustache), and the mysterious Mexicano named John Smith (the romantic lead and mostly straight-man, played by Antonio Moreno).

While some jokes are funnier than others, there aren't any that fall flat--and that includes one involving Sebastian that I assume was somewhat shocking back in the day. One of the funniest is set up early in the picture and pays off at the very end when the evil sheriff gets his well-deserved come-uppance... while one of the most mysterious is the presence of a cross-dressing actor in black face portraying Rose's maid. This character is so strange and so out-of-place that I assume it's a reference to something contemporary audiences would have understood but is lost on me. (I have a couple ideas about what it might mean, but I can't help but feel that I'm looking at the scene with 21st century eyes and therefore imposing something on that wasn't there when it was filmed. If anyone has seen the "Wide Open Spaces" who wants to comment on cross-dressing maid in blackface, I'd love to hear your thoughts.)

All-in-all, this is another great bit of fast-moving, whacky fun from the Masquers Club... and one that I think will be as entertaining to the modern viewer as it was to audiences back in 1931.

Dorothy Sebastian is not impressed.