The Big Gamble

The Big Gamble opens on New Year's eve, with a broke gambler trying to figure out how to work his way out of debt. Alan Beckwith (Bill Boyd) gets local thug Andrew North (Warner Oland) and Beverly Ames (Dorothy Sebastian) involved in a scheme to come up with money fast. Viewers will recognize Warner Oland as the lead in all the Charlie Chan movies in the 1930s. Also keep an eye out for James Gleason as Squint Dugan, small time crook. He will go on to play the ultimate slow-witted New York police lieutenant in just about every film made in the 1940s. Zasu Pitts plays Dugan's wife, maid to the Beckwiths. Sound and light quality are a little iffy, but that can be forgiven, since it was the early days of talkies. The dialogue is all a bit stilted and hesitating, apparently since everyone was new to the live sound track. Director Fred Niblo only made two more films after this one. Niblo had an interesting history; his brother- in- law was George M. Cohan, and Niblo was one of the founders of the Academy of Motion Pictures. Not the strongest script or acting, but its a fun, low-key film. Even a couple surprises.

Alan Beckwith owes a large gambling debt to gangster Andrew North. Alan agrees to take on an $100k life insurance policy. He also agrees to marry Beverly who is under North's control. After the mandatory one year wait, he will kill himself and leave the money to Beverly. North assigns Squint Dugan to watch over the couple.

This is a pre-Code crime drama from RKO. The staging is a bit play-like. It's early filmmaking. I do like the premise. It has potential to go down differing paths. There is an obvious flaw with North's plan. Alan is a gambler and he's got nothing to lose as he gets closer to the one year mark. He's going to gamble. If he makes a lot of money, he's going to try to buy his way out. If he loses a lot of money, it doesn't matter to him anyways. The comedic touches don't really work. After a slow-moving two thirds, the movie does rise up in tension culminating into a good fast-pace car chase.

The film begins with William Boyd (later known to the world as Hopalong Cassiday) meeting Warner Oland in a restaurant. It seems that Boyd owes gangster Oland $5000 and instead of paying him back, he has an intriguing proposition--he'll kill himself and make it look like an accident to that Oland gets his money. Oland likes the idea but isn't interested in just a paltry five grand, so he modifies the idea. Since most policies won't pay off for the first year, Oland will arrange a sham marriage and support Boyd and his new bride for one year--then an "accident" will occur. And, to make sure that nothing happens to Boyd in the meantime (such as cold feet), Oland arranges to have gunman James Gleason follow him and make sure nothing happens during that year. Now too surprisingly, suicidal Boyd actually falls in love with this arranged wife and by now it's too late--Oland won't let him out of the deal.

This plot is very tough to believe and needlessly complicated. Arranging for a wife as well as Gleason seems a bit like overkill. Simply having Oland be the beneficiary seems to make far less sense--but, of course, this changes the plot and then there's no reason for Boyd to change his mind. Despite this rather substantial plot hole and a slow first half of the film, it all managed to pull itself together in the second half--and culminating with a very well-staged chase scene where you DON'T have cheap rear-projected shots and you have some very violent and realistic elements (making it perhaps the best car chase of the era). No cheap stock footage here or a crash that looks ridiculous--it's very well done and made my heart race.

Overall, this is a B-movie with some serious flaws, but provided you can just watch the film without questioning them, you'll be very pleasantly surprised by the end--nearly earning this film an 8. A good job of acting by all except Oland--whose delivery, unfortunately, isn't too much better than his Charlie Chan character in other films!

William Boyd is willing to kill himself for enough insurance money to pay off his debts, but crime boss Warner Oland raises the stakes: a year and a day, and the money will nominally be paid to wife-for-hire Dorothy Sebastian. But a lot can happen in a year...

Shot beautifully by under-rated DP Hal Mohr, this movie, with a newly mobile sound camera is very good visually. Unfortunately, leads Boyd and Sebastian are not quite out of the silent era and director Fred Niblo is not so good at directing the dialogue -- nor does the depression that the leads evince for the first half of the movie, help things much. James Gleason and Zasu Pitts are, of course, excellent, but, despite an excitingly shot finale,the acting prevents this from being more than an averagely good picture.

"The Big Gamble" has one of the most provocative premises ever cooked up for a movie. World-weary gambler Alan Beckwith (William "Hopalong Cassidy" Boyd in a surprisingly despairing modern-dress role) is tired of life. Owing $5,000 to the sinister Andrew North (Warner Oland) and $2,500 to a former servant, Beckwith cooks up the idea of having North take out an insurance policy on his life, then killing himself. North insists that the policy be for $100,000; that a North-hired hit man do the actual killing (since if Beckwith commits suicide, the policy becomes invalid); that Beckwith live a year and a day after taking out the policy; and that Beckwith's wife be the beneficiary. When Beckwith protests that he doesn't have a wife, North supplies him one: Beverly Ames (Dorothy Sebastian), who's under North's influence because her brother Johnny (William Collier, Jr.) is also on the hook to him. The good news is in the striking performances of both leads - and of James Gleason and ZaSu Pitts as a comic-relief couple (though I have a hard time watching Pitts in comic roles without thinking of how Hollywood wasted her talent as a dramatic actress despite her incandescent performance as Trina in Stroheim's "Greed," which should have done for her what "Sybil" and "Norma Rae" did for Sally Field 50 years later) — and some intriguingly proto-noir compositions by cinematographer Hal Mohr.

The bad news is Fred Niblo's surprisingly slow, stodgy direction - by 1931 virtually no one was still having the actors pause between hearing their cues and speaking their own lines, but Niblo directs like it was still 1929 - Mohr's mostly plain, uncreative cinematography (which doesn't sustain the marvelous atmospherics of the opening scenes), and some dubious performances by the supporting players. William Collier, Jr. comes off way too queeny as Johnny - we can't muster much sympathy for someone this wimpy - and Warner Oland, though playing a character with an Anglo name, inexplicably not only wears his Charlie Chan makeup but speaks in his Charlie Chan voice. Though a previous silent version of this story was made, "The Big Gamble" really should have been filmed a third time in the 1940's; its plot would have been a natural for film noir.