First seen as "Tiger Shark" then remade every couple of years with different professions, the electrical profession was utilized several more times up until the 1950's, first as "Manpower" and later as "The Cruel Tower" (made at Allied Artists, not Warner Brothers like the other films), and each of these films is different enough to wear they can be barely qualified to be called remakes. This film replaces the fishing industry with electric towers, and has veteran steeplejack Pat O'Brien taking farmer Henry Fonda under his wing after foreman J. Farrell MacDonald turns him down for a job for being too young.
Fonda's enthusiasm has him going from working on the ground to climbing these huge towers, and eventually, the two men set out on their own to work in Chicago where O'Brien's girlfriend, nurse Margaret Lindsay, works. It's obvious that she falls in love with Fonda at first sight, and when they return to MacDonald's camp, she follows them which results in her feelings being revealed when Fonda has an accident.
Lacking In the heat of the 1932 and 1941 versions (both of which starred Edward G. Robinson), it puts the romantic intrigue on the back burner for a look at what steeplejacks do. That crisp Warner Brothers sound and music department detail is fantastic, and the tension really rises in a big snowstorm where they must repair one of the towers that has been damaged.
Stuart Erwin is good as one of the groundworkers who goes along singing the same song over and over, and Jane Wyman, long before she became a big star and the first Mrs Ronald Reagan, appears briefly as his girlfriend. While this was obviously given the A budget treatment, it is obvious that the B unit at Warner Brothers could make something different out of it, and they did just that with an early 1940's version, "King of the Lumberjacks" which came out the year before the more successful "Manpower". Watching the late night lineup on TCM reveals a lot of remakes of different budgets from the various major studios in the 1930's and 40's, often where the story writer of the previous versions wasn't even credited..
Fonda's enthusiasm has him going from working on the ground to climbing these huge towers, and eventually, the two men set out on their own to work in Chicago where O'Brien's girlfriend, nurse Margaret Lindsay, works. It's obvious that she falls in love with Fonda at first sight, and when they return to MacDonald's camp, she follows them which results in her feelings being revealed when Fonda has an accident.
Lacking In the heat of the 1932 and 1941 versions (both of which starred Edward G. Robinson), it puts the romantic intrigue on the back burner for a look at what steeplejacks do. That crisp Warner Brothers sound and music department detail is fantastic, and the tension really rises in a big snowstorm where they must repair one of the towers that has been damaged.
Stuart Erwin is good as one of the groundworkers who goes along singing the same song over and over, and Jane Wyman, long before she became a big star and the first Mrs Ronald Reagan, appears briefly as his girlfriend. While this was obviously given the A budget treatment, it is obvious that the B unit at Warner Brothers could make something different out of it, and they did just that with an early 1940's version, "King of the Lumberjacks" which came out the year before the more successful "Manpower". Watching the late night lineup on TCM reveals a lot of remakes of different budgets from the various major studios in the 1930's and 40's, often where the story writer of the previous versions wasn't even credited..