Quick Millions (Fox Film Corporation, 1931)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night Charles and I watched two of the three films completely directed by Rowland Brown, an enigmatic filmmaker whose imdb.com page lists writing credits for 22 feature films and two TV episodes but only four films as director, and on the last of which, MGM’s The Devil Is a Sissy, he was fired in mid-shooting and wasn’t credited on the film itself. Brown specialized in gangster stories and after breaking through in Hollywood in 1929 with movies with titles like Fugitives, Points West and The Doorway to Hell, in 1931 he got a chance to write and direct a gangster movie for the pre-20th Century Fox Film Corporation. The film was Quick Millions and it starred the young Spencer Tracy, in only his second movie (after yet another crime film, John Ford’s Up the River, which was also either the first or second feature film with Humphrey Bogart), as “Bugs” Raymond, a proletarian but status-seeking truck driver who in the opening sequence bitterly and deliberately crashes his truck into the fender of a fancy car. The crash does little damage but it expresses Raymond’s deep desire to make a fortune by any means necessary and take his place among the rich and powerful. The movie starts in 1924 and soon Raymond and “Nails” Markey (Warner Richmond), his friend and fellow truck driver, realize that if they can get all the city’s (unnamed, as usual) truck drivers into an association, they can control the local economy because virtually all other businesses are dependent on trucks – and truck drivers – to bring in raw materials, ship out finished goods and place them with retailers.

The film starts in 1924 and there’s a creative montage sequence showing a series of license plates, each attached to a fancier personal car for Raymond, that shows him working his way up and using the income from the trucking racket to build a fortune and muscle in on legitimate building developers and contractors. Along the way there’s one incredible sequence in which he and his men sabotage a series of cars to build up the repair business at Nails’ garage – and on one such car he not only smashes the windows with a hammer but then turns a blowtorch on it, which Charles and I thought was overkill. Either smashing the windows or setting the car on fire would seem to have been enough to make the point; they shouldn’t have had to do both. Along the way Bugs forces developer Kenneth Stone (John Wray) to make him a partner in his latest skyscraper by threatening to block all shipments of building supplies to the project if Stone refuses – and Bugs sets up a network of subcontractors to spread the business of building Stone’s building around to his various no-good associates. The film oddly anticipates another film Tracy made at Fox four years later, Dante’s Inferno, in which he plays a carnival barker who rises to head a crooked entertainment enterprise only to meet his downfall when he, as he does here, abandons his class-peer girlfriend Daisy De Lisle (Sally Eilers) to pursue Stone’s daughter Dorothy (Marguerite Churchill) and spends a lot of his time taking her to horse races and operas (though we don’t actually see them together at an opera, which might have made a nice fish-out-of-water scene).

While that’s happening some of Bugs’ associates get restless and start making plans to take over the gang and freeze the distracted Bugs out. There’s a party sequence at which a piano player runs through songs like “St. Louis Blues” and “Frankie and Johnny” while one of Bugs’ henchmen, Jimmy Kirk (George Raft, a year before his breakthrough film, the 1932 Scarface, was released), dances. Charles complained that even though Raft could dance (and was widely believed to have real-life connections to organized crime; the Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. character in Little Caesar, who quits the rackets to become a dancing star, was widely believed to have been based on Raft), Brown shot much of his dance from the waist down, making it look like he was using a dance double even though he wasn’t. Indeed, Brown went for a lot of oblique angles in this film; one of the murders is filmed from under a table and so we see that someone has killed someone but we don’t get to see who killed whom. Much of Quick Millions is filmed fairly straightforwardly, but we get some expressions of directorial ingenuity and off-beat lighting (the cinematographer was the well-regarded Joseph August) and the sorts of chiaroscuro shadow effects that were then known as “the German style” and later came to be called film noir. Another trademark of Brown’s gangster stories very much in evidence in this film is his social consciousness; there’s a scene in which the local district attorney calls a meeting of the respectable businesspeople in town and tries to get them to resist the racketeers and stop doing business with them. There were a lot of scenes like that in early-1930’s gangster films – often demanded by the censors who felt that somebody in these movies should offer a forthright moral attack to counter the way the films made the gangster life look glamorous and attractive – but very few were written as explosively as this one. When the D.A. character starts condemning the lawyers that find legal loopholes to keep the gangsters in business, he sounds like a character in a Bertolt Brecht play or script.

There’s also a scene at the opening of Stone’s new building, photographed by newspapers and a sound newsreel truck, with Bugs looking on and ushered out of camera range by Stone – and as Stone prattles on for public consumption about the virtues of hard work and legitimate business, one of the newsreel crew gives him the finger. He doesn’t see it, of course, but his colleague does and so do we. The ending of Quick Millions is a bizarre set of scenes in which Bugs decides he and his gang will crash the wedding of Dorothy Stone to her nice, respectable upper-class fiancé – was he hoping to carry her off the way Dustin Hoffman would do with Katharine Ross at the end of The Graduate? – only along the way his associates decide to do away with the increasingly inconvenient Bugs instead. The final scene shows Bugs’ fellow gangsters pulling down the window curtains of the car he’s riding in with them, then a shot is heard and the car pulls up to the church and its door opens. A top hat spills out, and then the “End” credit comes up. Quick Millions has some problems – Tracy’s performance is a little too chipper, lacking the understatement and naturalism that would come later as he got more familiar with film (one might say he’s trying too hard to be James Cagney at a time the real Cagney was rocketing to stardom at Warner Bros. with the similarly plotted The Public Enemy), and more than most early talkies this one really suffers from the lack of a music score – but on the whole it’s a promising directorial debut and should have established Rowland Brown as a major filmmaker with a special flair for the nexus of organized crime and the ostensibly law-abiding citizens who consort with or take advantage of it.