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You know, it's always them pretty guys who can get away with that stuff
I don't know what kind of voice John Gilbert's silent fans expected him to have. If it's true that his sound played any part in the demise of his career, then I have to assume they imagined something clean and classical, like an American Ronald Colman, the kind of voice that could make Shakespeare out of introducing itself on the subway. Hearing Gilbert speak for the first time in Tod Browning's Fast Workers (1933), it's true that Shakespeare was one of the last things on my mind, unless we're talking the skeevier bits of Much Ado About Nothing. But it works just fine. As construction-site rake "Gunner" Smith, Gilbert has a slightly flat-voweled, slightly abrasive baritone—bad for a romantic hero, perhaps, but great for a charming heel. And that's the dictionary definition of the Gunner, with his raffish mustache and his lean body, equally agile shinning around steel girders or quick-changing out of his evening clothes because he's come straight to work from yet another shack-up. He can banter with the speediest of the screwballs; he can sneer without changing his smile, delivering with Cagney-grade contempt the fantastic brush-off "Ah, go stuff a duck." He's even almost a good enough bullshit artist to convince himself that he's sleeping with his best friend's girlfriends out of the kindness of his heart—after all, if he can pick them up like nickels in the street, they're hardly the kinds of girl a best buddy should marry, are they? The viewer should not need much experience with double entendres to recognize that the title refers not only to efficient construction work, but to Gunner's track record with the opposite sex. His buddy "Bucker" Reilly (Robert Armstrong), the slow, silent type given to marriage proposals after a woman says two words to him, can only stare in admiration. He hasn't met a girl yet that Gunner hasn't been able to prove a floozy. That doesn't even count the flings this Don Juan of the I-beams has on his own time. To the rest of the construction crew, the whole thing's as good as a long-running soap.
I wish I could say the same about the film itself. It has the gritty, scrappy energy of many a pre-Code programmer, outspoken sexuality and economics included, but it can't decide whether it wants to be a hard-boiled love story or a cautionary tale of bros before hos, Depression-style, and when it tries to land both at once in the third act, it just falls over sideways into poorly explained melodrama with a bewildering comedy whiplash that leaves the audience wondering if the director just scribbled "PUNCH LINE GOES HERE" on the shooting script and walked off the set.1 I'm left feeling most positive about the performances. Armstrong's Bucker is a genial dope, but he can turn as stonily dangerous as any man who thinks he's been made a fool of. The construction workers are a lightly sketched cast of colorful blue-collar types of whom the scene-stealer is Sterling Holloway's Pinky, a whifty-voiced riveter who isn't quite the fool he looks.2 More importantly, Mae Clarke gets some great scenes as no-last-name Mary, Bucker's latest crush and Gunner's long-time girl; she's a fast worker, too, a practiced lightener of hearts and wallets who boasts of herself as "a girl [who] can trim every guy she meets from Frisco to New York." Her specialty is looking like an innocent astray; when Bucker tries to call her on it, sarcastically proffering a raft of sob-story clichés, she bamboozles him magnificently by demanding to know who told him about her ailing grandmother and her overdue rent and the job she lost for resisting her boss' advances and the family locket she was forced to pawn, all with such authentic, tearful fright that all he can do is stammer that he "ain't a detective." Her only soft spot is for Gunner, but he claims "that forever and ever stuff . . . makes me want to reach for my hat." They don't pretend fidelity to one another, which means they don't treat each other like marks; however amorally, they are probably each the other's healthiest relationship. The trouble comes when Mary finds herself touched by Bucker's dumb but honest devotion and Gunner recognizes too late that great sex and emotional candor might actually be what most people mean when they talk about love and I've mentioned before that I can't stand love triangles, right? At least there are some trickily vertiginous shots atop a half-built skyscraper and the whole thing lasts only 66 minutes, so it didn't take much out of my night.
But it proved to me that Gilbert should have had a sound career, even if he moved into character acting rather than top-billed romances. He's good in Fast Workers, regardless of the coherence of the film around him; he could carry a picture even in an antiheroic role. According to IMDb, it was his third-to-last. In a reasonable universe, it would only have been mid-career. This evidence brought to you by my true-hearted backers at Patreon.
1. Browning's name is in the credits, but not as director: he was so unhappy with the studio assignment of Fast Workers after the notorious failure of Freaks (1932) that he tried to take his name off the picture. I suppose it would not console him that I think it was a better directing job than Dracula (1931).
2. He moons over a nest of pigeons like they were his own babies ("I think they're going to have blue eyes") and most of his lines fall a half-step to the side of actual human dialogue ("Well, you know, boys will be plumbers"), but he's a sly kibitzer and a poker shark. He has no real effect on the plot, but I was glad to see him all the same.
I wish I could say the same about the film itself. It has the gritty, scrappy energy of many a pre-Code programmer, outspoken sexuality and economics included, but it can't decide whether it wants to be a hard-boiled love story or a cautionary tale of bros before hos, Depression-style, and when it tries to land both at once in the third act, it just falls over sideways into poorly explained melodrama with a bewildering comedy whiplash that leaves the audience wondering if the director just scribbled "PUNCH LINE GOES HERE" on the shooting script and walked off the set.1 I'm left feeling most positive about the performances. Armstrong's Bucker is a genial dope, but he can turn as stonily dangerous as any man who thinks he's been made a fool of. The construction workers are a lightly sketched cast of colorful blue-collar types of whom the scene-stealer is Sterling Holloway's Pinky, a whifty-voiced riveter who isn't quite the fool he looks.2 More importantly, Mae Clarke gets some great scenes as no-last-name Mary, Bucker's latest crush and Gunner's long-time girl; she's a fast worker, too, a practiced lightener of hearts and wallets who boasts of herself as "a girl [who] can trim every guy she meets from Frisco to New York." Her specialty is looking like an innocent astray; when Bucker tries to call her on it, sarcastically proffering a raft of sob-story clichés, she bamboozles him magnificently by demanding to know who told him about her ailing grandmother and her overdue rent and the job she lost for resisting her boss' advances and the family locket she was forced to pawn, all with such authentic, tearful fright that all he can do is stammer that he "ain't a detective." Her only soft spot is for Gunner, but he claims "that forever and ever stuff . . . makes me want to reach for my hat." They don't pretend fidelity to one another, which means they don't treat each other like marks; however amorally, they are probably each the other's healthiest relationship. The trouble comes when Mary finds herself touched by Bucker's dumb but honest devotion and Gunner recognizes too late that great sex and emotional candor might actually be what most people mean when they talk about love and I've mentioned before that I can't stand love triangles, right? At least there are some trickily vertiginous shots atop a half-built skyscraper and the whole thing lasts only 66 minutes, so it didn't take much out of my night.
But it proved to me that Gilbert should have had a sound career, even if he moved into character acting rather than top-billed romances. He's good in Fast Workers, regardless of the coherence of the film around him; he could carry a picture even in an antiheroic role. According to IMDb, it was his third-to-last. In a reasonable universe, it would only have been mid-career. This evidence brought to you by my true-hearted backers at Patreon.
1. Browning's name is in the credits, but not as director: he was so unhappy with the studio assignment of Fast Workers after the notorious failure of Freaks (1932) that he tried to take his name off the picture. I suppose it would not console him that I think it was a better directing job than Dracula (1931).
2. He moons over a nest of pigeons like they were his own babies ("I think they're going to have blue eyes") and most of his lines fall a half-step to the side of actual human dialogue ("Well, you know, boys will be plumbers"), but he's a sly kibitzer and a poker shark. He has no real effect on the plot, but I was glad to see him all the same.
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Thank you! I'm really glad you're enjoying these.
Also, I now need to use "go stuff a duck" in my daily life.
GO FOR IT.
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I feel a need to work this phrase into a conversation somehow.
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I support this endeavor.
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Il y avait un plombier, Francois
Qui plombait sa femme dans le bois
Dit elle "Arretez!
J'entends quelqu'un venait!"
Dit le plombier, en plombent, "C'est moi."
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I've heard that for years with pizza delivery.