The World Gone Mad (Majestic, 1933)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night, after we watched Deadly DILF, my husband Charles and I gathered at the computer for a YouTube post of a 1933 film from the short-lived Majestic studio (a quite interesting independent company that, like Sono Art-World Wide, Tiffany and Mayfair, had the bad luck to launch just before the 1929 stock market crash and the resulting Great Depression) called The World Gone Mad. Directed by Christy Cabanne (the fourth and least talented of the former D. W. Griffith assistants who became directors in their own rights: the others were Erich von Stroheim, Tod Browning and Raoul Walsh!) from a script by Edward T. Lowe, Jr., The World Gone Mad’s title is easily the best thing about it. It’s a pretty routine story about a bunch of ostensibly respectable but actually crooked businesspeople, including Christopher Bruno (Louis Calhern, though for some reason Majestic’s title writers spelled his last name “Calhearn”), Grover Cromwell (John St. Polis) and Graham Gaines (Richard Tucker), who have looted the Standard Utility Company and extracted almost all its value, exchanging its shares for those in worthless shell companies. They’re being investigated and are about to be exposed by local district attorney Avery Henderson (Wallis Clark), who’s convinced a corrupt accountant who filed false business records for them to admit his own guilt and turn state’s evidence. In order to keep that from happening, Bruno decides to hire a hit person to kill Henderson, and there’s a grimly amusing scene in which Bruno offers $20,000 for the “hit” on Henderson, the offer filters down to various middlemen each of whom takes a 50 percent cut, so when the job finally reaches the actual shooter, Ramon Salvadore (J. Carrol Naish), he only gets $2,000. As part of the plan, Henderson is lured to the apartment of Carlotta Lamont (Evelyn Brent), girlfriend of the accountant who was going to rat out the rest of the gang, and the scene is staged to look like she and Henderson were having an illicit affair and she shot him out of jealousy.

Henderson’s friend, reporter Andy Terrell (Pat O’Brien, top-billed), is convinced that’s not true, and so are we since we’ve already seen scenes of Henderson at home with his wife Evelyn (Geneva Mitchell) and their son Ralph (Buster Phelps, a typically obnoxious movie kid). There’s a nice running gag early on in the movie about Ralph’s exasperation with his dad because dad has just bought him a model train set, but Ralph never gets a chance to play with it because dad is always running it himself. At one point Ralph audibly wishes his father would disappear, and the audience – already knowing what fate the bad guys have in store for the D.A. – thinks, “Be careful what you wish for, kid! You might just get it!” Though Henderson gets killed, the investigation doesn’t stop because the state governor just appoints a new D.A., Lionel Houston (Neil Hamilton, 33 years before he returned to official law enforcement as Gotham City Police Commissioner Gordon on the 1966 Batman TV series), who continues it. At one point Lionel gets a letter from the original informant that says he can’t live with his guilt any more and he’s committing suicide – which he does, so we never actually see him and we wonder how much his confession will be worth in terms of evidence if and when the cases come to trial. Grover Cromwell, the one gang member who actually feels remorse about all the people who have lost their life savings through the gang’s stock manipulation and other activities, meets with Graham Gaines and tells him that there’s a shipment of gold worth $1 million that will enable them to pay off all the investors and still leave them a tidy profit.

Only it’s a ruse: Cromwell is determined to kill both himself and Gaines, and make it look like an accident so his widow will be able to collect on his life insurance and pay off the investors. So he takes Gaines in his car, ostensibly to the waterfront, but really to crash it into a train (a pretty obvious model) so both he and Gaines will die and pay the ultimate penalty for their crimes. Andy Terrell, who’s been dating Cromwell’s daughter Diane (Mary Brian – reuniting her and O’Brien from the 1931 film The Front Page, in which she played the nice young woman he was going to marry and quit journalism for; it occurs to me that if they’d got married for real she’d have been Mary Brian O’Brien), gets ambushed by the surviving gangsters in the final sequence, but the police, alerted by Lionel, arrive in time and save the good guys from Salvadore, who was there to kill them but ends up shot himself, while the other conspirators are arrested. The World Gone Mad is actually a pretty good movie, though as Charles pointed out it’s full of clichés that were done much better in other people’s films. One thing I liked about it is it’s more explicitly anti-capitalist than most other films from the early Depression era (it also takes place while Prohibition was still in effect, and the infrastructure with which otherwise law-abiding people were supplied with technically illegal booze is very much part of this film). Another cool scene is the one in which Andy and Diane meet in front of a movie theatre showing another Majestic release, The Vampire Bat (also written by Edward T. Lowe, Jr. and directed by Frank Strayer, who made first-rate horror indies like The Vampire Bat and Condemned to Live before he settled in at Columbia for a long-running sinecure directing the Blondie series based on Chic Young’s comic strip). The World Gone Mad is a variable film, with some scenes creatively directed and others given a flat, unatmospheric treatment – one wishes it could have been remade in the film noir era – and, as I said at the outset, though it’s reasonable entertainment for the period and the budget, that great title deserved a much better movie!