The Ruling Voice (1931)

Too much of everything

Great Film overall

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

Dull and Talky Early Talkie that has an Insightful Idea About Slick Suited Business Types Actually Running the Mob. A Behind Closed Doors Peek at the Money Men and the Machine They Operate that Causes Harm and Pain for the Average Citizen.There is a Creepy Atmosphere of No Empathy. They Even Take Milk from the Mouths of Babes. Except for the Fresh Concept of Adding Machines Instead of Machine Guns there isn't Enough Here to Recommend. A Message Movie that is Mundane to Say the Least.Also, it is a Pre-Code Movie with Nothing that Would Not Pass Post-Code. Loretta Young Fans Might Want to Check In and See the Star in an Early Role. Walter Huston is Bland and it Certainly is a Role that Just About Anyone Could Play, and He Looks Bored.

This early Warners social-consciousness riff raises several serious and still-timely issues: racketeering, price-fixing, corruption. And it has a great leading man in Walter Huston, here a racketeer who tries to reform to please his long-unseen daughter, Loretta Young, and become respectable enough to allow her marriage to nice, prestigious-but-broke David Manners, who plays, get this, one Dick Cheney. There's a gallery of interesting characters--Willard Robertson as a revenge-seeking businessman wronged by Huston's trust, Dudley Digges as Huston's utterly humorless second-in-command, Doris Kenyon as a socialite who's against all Huston's principles yet persuasively befriends him. This, and some other hard-to-believe plot twists, are pulled off pretty well, and Huston's as superb as usual. But it all builds to a tense climax that simply can't resolve itself satisfactorily. We want Young and Manners to end up together, and we want Huston to end happily. There's no way for both to happen, and the final image, that of a grocer lowering his prices again now that the racket's been busted, is supposed to suffice as a happy ending. Too much has preceded it, and we're left feeling unsatisfied. Still worth watching, certainly, as evidence of Warners' interest in tackling tough issues in its early talkies, and for Huston's expertise and Young's loveliness (she's good here, too). But I still felt cheated.

As he is in "Night Court," Walter Huston is superb in this harsh early mob story. Some might think his change of heart over daughter Loretta Young sentimental but not I. It is psychologically plausible and doesn't sell out the rough nature of the story. Not much ends happily, though the path for Young and David Manners -- a highly improbable couple -- does clear.Huston is probably best known for "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre." To me, he is first and foremost the fine American businessman in the lovely "Dodsworth." He was very convincing in these earlier unsympathetic roles, though. This movie pulls no punches and has some scary scenes. It doesn't seem at all dated. It could have been made 70 years later -- but teenagers wouldn't be interested so it wouldn't have been.

A potentially interesting entry in Warner Brothers' series of crime dramas is weakened by an improbably wordy script, stagey performances -- Walter Huston, in this early role, seems to have no sense of where the camera is -- and an outright awful performance by Doris Kenyon, who, although fifth-billed, is actually the female lead.Despite the ethnic types that inhabit the better Warners crime dramas, the Irishmen and Italians, this one seems to be inhabited solely by WASPS who wear impeccable, old fashioned clothing.On the plus side, Loretta Young is in her luminously beautiful phase, an absolute pleasure to look at, although she isn't given much to do. David Manners is adequate as the juvenile lead and the idea of the story, how honest men can be driven to become criminals, is potentially interesting. But this movie doesn't live up to its potential.