by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Manhattan
Tower, an obscure but quite good
little movie produced by a short-lived outfit called Remington Pictures in 1932
(the editors of the American Film Institute Catalog didn’t get to see this one but they reported that
the reason Remington Pictures didn’t last was that the company’s founder, A. E.
Lefcourt, who put up the $50,000 to make it, died right after making this
film). It’s a cheap-studio knockoff of Grand Hotel but within its budget limitations (as well as the
state of its preservation; the version we were watching was an archive.org
download of an actual restoration, but though the soundtrack was complete some
scenes were still missing visually and were filled in with blank film, so the
screen would suddenly go black while the sound continued) it’s an excellent
movie, centered around the two factors that are often said to determine all
human relationships, especially marital ones: sex and money. The entire film
takes place inside the Manhattan Tower skyscraper (obviously inspired by the
Empire State Building — indeed in the final scenes of the film it’s represented
by footage of the actual Empire State Building) and the central character is
Kenneth Burns (Clay Clement), New York manager of the National Products
Company, who instead of concentrating on that job spends most of his time
speculating on the stock market. Befitting the Depression era in which this
film was made, his investments have all gone south and rendered him broke (when
we see him listen to market quotes on the radio and every stock referenced is going down in price, my first
thought was, “He’s either short-selling like crazy or he’s losing his shirt,”
and of course the latter turns out to be true), and he’s facing a $2,000 margin
call, without which his broker will sell him out completely. He’s so desperate,
in fact, that he swindles the $1,000 life savings of his secretary, Mary Harper
(Mary Brian, top-billed), and promptly loses it when he can’t come up with the
other $1,000 he needs because his bookkeeper, Mr. Hoyt (Jed Prouty), won’t O.K.
his request for an advance on his salary. Mary and her fiancé Jimmy Duncan
(James Hall) were counting on that money so they could get married and buy
their dream home in Kew Gardens; Jimmy works in the electrical room of the
tower but is hoping he and his boss will get a contract to put wire into
another major building and get considerably more money.
In addition to
swindling the 99 percent out of their meager savings to maintain his own
speculations — as if that weren’t bad enough — Burns is also cheating on his
wife Ann (Irene Rich), whose own fortune gave him the capital to launch his
career as a (bad) investor; he first makes a pass at Mary, and when she
virtuously turns him down (though the fact that she let Burns touch her arm
inspired a jealous hissy-fit from Jimmy) Burns instead takes up with one of his
other office workers, party girl Marge Lyon (Noel Francis — a girl named
Noel?), who’s shown up in a party dress from a party that literally lasted all
night and was still going when she realized she’d have to leave it to get to
work. (She calls her boyfriend de jour to pack up her street dress and bring it to her so she can change at
the office, and his attempts to find her in the big building are the film’s
principal source of comic relief.) As if all that weren’t enough plot, there’s
another storyline: two big depositors in the Tower Security Bank on the bottom
floor of the tower are threatening to pull their deposits out, and attorney
Whitman (Hale Hamilton) — who’s also in love with Ann Burns and is encouraging
her to divorce her broke and philandering husband and marry him instead (and hubby, being the rotter
he is, tells her that $50,000 is his price for her freedom) — arranges a
meeting and ultimately the bank chairman persuades his big depositors to stay
in. Unfortunately, Whitman’s ditzy secretary Miss Wood (Nydia Westman)
overhears the conversation in the meeting, concludes that the bank is about to
fail and not only pulls her own money out but mentions all this in a crowded
elevator and starts a run on the bank.
Manhattan Tower is actually a more unusual movie than the synopsis
makes it sound, partly because writers David Hempstead (story) and Norman
Houston (adaptation and dialogue) deploy their clichés in fresh and unexpected
ways and partly because the director, the very interesting Frank R. Strayer (a
potentially major filmmaker whose innovative experiments and genuine flair for
the Gothic and strange got put aside when he won the job directing the Blondie series films at Columbia), shoots it in wild and
provocative ways, including building-eye view shots of the people below as they
swarm into the tower for the day’s work (contrary to the synopsis on imdb.com,
the Tower is not a residential building;
it’s entirely offices) and an astonishing effect from the elevator’s point of
view showing it moving up or down the shaft whenever people in the story use it
to move more than one floor up or down at a time. (When they’re just going from
one floor to the next, either above or below, Strayer uses a simple elevator
crane: still a highly unusual device for a low-budget indie in 1932.) For an
indie the sets are enviably substantial and solid-looking, and though some of
the shots of the building itself were undoubtedly done with models, the effects
are utterly convincing. Manhattan Tower is an extraordinary movie, one of the real gems of the early 1930’s, obviously inspired by the success of Grand Hotel but considerably darker and richer than the
major-studio brethren that also tried to apply the formula of Grand Hotel to a business skyscraper (Skyscraper Souls,
Steel Against the Sky, etc.) and with some
reflections on the arrogance of wealth and power that seem all too timely today!
