User Reviews

I purchased this movie on VHS from Moviesunlimited.com a while back and just got around t watching it today. I'm a big fan of Mr. Arnold's and have seen most of his movies. I've seen good ones, I've seen bad ones...this one is around the middle.

It is an independent film he made in 1953. (He didn't make many movies after 1950.) Anyway, the story is about a machine magnate named J.r. Compton (Arnold), who takes his son Ray (Agar) into the family business after he graduates from college. His plan is for Ray to take over the firm. As the two drive up to the company we get a glimpse of Compton's mercurial behavior. In the first five minutes of the film he fires an employee (John Hamilton) that has been with him for not having the sign on the building changed to read "Compton and Son". He reinforces the point of the firing by taking a sword off the wall and slices a trash bin in two with it. He then shows Ray where the employees live. (It seems everyone in the town works for Arnold's company an he provides housing.) They are only allowed to grow petunias in front of their homes and if they don't like it, they can find another job. (Fat chance at that!) Compton Sr. even has the "right" girl for his son to marry: a frosty blonde whose father is also wealthy.

Compton, Jr. decides that he wants to learn the job from the ground up and chooses to work in the factory. The foreman is willing to help him until he learns that he's J.R.'s son and gives him the cold shoulder, thinking the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. As they are working, he frostily warns him to put on protective glasses. He doesn't and injures his eye. J.R. fires the foreman and gets his friend the banker to fire the foreman's daughter (Susan Morrow). Ray gets wind of it and forces his father to rehire the foreman, which he does, albeit reluctantly.

One night Ray gets beat up by two thugs. Compton, Sr. feels it is in retaliation for firing the foreman. He tells the staff on loudspeaker that unless they give up who it was that beat up his son, he will fire ten men for each day they are silent. Once again Ray gets wind of this and stops his father's megalomania.

In the meantime, Ray dumps Princess Frosty Locks and begins seeing Morrow. They fall in love and he asks her to marry him. She urns him down, saying she is from the wrong side of the tracks. he refuses t take no for an answer and they plan to marry.

In the meantime, the company wants to unionize and Ray is all for it, J.r. gets wind of it and confronts his son. A fight ensues and J.R makes disparaging remarks about ray's deceased mother and tries to attack him with a fireplace poker. Ray escapes and leaves J.R. sobbing in front of the portrait of his late wife over the fireplace.

Later that night, J.R. goes to the factory and makes a piece of machinery from some blueprints. By doing this menial task, he realizes hat he has lost sight of what it means to be humble and caring. He then changes his ways and approves of his son's marriage, giving her a necklace that had belonged to his late wife, Ray's mother. He also gives ray the do hickey he made in the machine shop, under glass, so that he will never lose sight of how to treat people, like he once had. Oh yea, and they found the two guys that beat up Ray...they were two troublemakers who didn't even work for J.R.'s company.

The one thing I found annoying about this film was the blaring music behind the soundtrack. At times, it was so loud, it distracted me from what the characters were saying.

Still, I would give this movie a five, only because Edward Arnold can make any crap movie enjoyable, even though there were times he chewed up the scenery.

"The fella that yells the loudest always wins the argument!" So says small-town Factory owner Edward Arnold, a megalomaniac power-hungry monster of a boss and father who brings his son John Agar home from college with the intention of eventually turning over his company to him. Flashes of powerful people fly through my mind as I think of that quote being their philosophy, and this often hard to take social drama really makes the point as Arnold indicates that while he's made thousands of mistakes, he's never had to own up to them because nobody would dare make him. It's obvious that his factory employees are very unhappy, and when Agar's identity is revealed, he is blamed for the sins of the father even though it was his intention to eventually try to change things for the better. Not only at conflict with other employees, this puts him in conflict with his father, especially after the foreman is fired along with his pretty daughter, Dorothy Patrick, causing them to lose their house that Arnold owns.

What's good about this film is that Arnold is not a one-dimensional monster even though he is a hideous man. He is given a few slim layers of sympathy and gets to show his pride and love for his son, but his superiority towards everybody else is an indication of something deeper. But there is an incompleteness in certain elements of the film, having scenes cut in very jarring ways during the middle of important conversations. The acting also consists of a lot of sneers, mostly by Arnold but sometimes by Agar, which to the script's benefit shows similarities between father and son, something that son obviously wants to get rid of. Arnold has played this role many times before (most memorably in "Meet John Doe"), and is quite commanding even though his character is someone in the audience wants to see strung up from the nearest tree. A passable independent message film that obviously some powerful people have never seen and probably should have.