Graft

Every Poverty Row producer's favorite lead actor, Regis Toomey, is the world's most clueless cub reporter in this comedy-action newspaper romp about the events around a crusading District Attorney killed by Boris Karloff, two days before the election on the orders of his corrupt machine boss -- although the laughs are few and weak, alas. Toomey, as always, is up to his role, plenty of energy. Female lead, Sue Carol, however, cannot manage much in the way of an emotional register.

This is the sort of movie that has been done better before and afterward, but director Christy Cabanne plays with some interesting traveling shots. They must have been expensive as anything to achieve in this poverty row second feature, but Christy was not giving up a moving camera just because it was difficult. Unfortunately, he was not much of a dialogue director at this point, and Sue Carol's performance suffers. Also, I was rather taken aback by a flight of stairs into a cabin on board a yacht -- no handrails and the stairs are open. I wouldn't want to be going belowdecks that way on a rough sea.

On net, this is not a movie to seek out unless you are a Karloff fan, a Regis Toomey fan -- there may be one or two of those around -- or so mad for Sue Carol that you don't care if she's in black and white. Her career didn't go much further -- a few years later, she became an agent, married Alan Ladd and promoted him into a major star.

A cheap and rather unremarkable film about a zany wannabe reporter (Regis Toomey) who tries to earn his wings by trailing a crooked politician and his murdering henchman (played by Boris Karloff). Though the movie is nothing much, it runs only 58 minutes and Karloff is at least featured steadily throughout. It's interesting to watch him strut his stuff if you're a fan of his (and he does get to say some funny lines).

This is supposedly the pre-FRANKENSTEIN feature where director James Whale noticed Boris in the Universal commissary and convinced him that Karloff had the perfect look to play the Monster. *1/2 out of ****

Pre-code crime picture with a little comedy, starring Regis Toomey as a reporter looking for his big break, which comes when a district attorney is killed. Forgettable B movie, notable today only because of Boris Karloff in a supporting part as one of the bad guys. This was released just a couple of months before Karloff's breakthrough role in Frankenstein. Toomey's kind of annoying in this with his nasally voice and whiny "gee whiz" manner. His character's name is Dustin. I don't claim to have seen all or even most movies from this period but I've seen a lot. I think this might be the first Dustin I've come across in a movie from this time. Playing the girl tied up in it all is Sue Carol, who would go on to greater success as an agent and eventually wife to Alan Ladd.

This is a very typical sort of B-movie plot. And, like all true Bs, this one clocks in at about an hour, as B-movies were intended as a short film to accompany the main feature.

When the film begins, Dustin Hotchkiss (Regis Toomey) is seeking a job as a reporter. However, no one wants to talk to him so he does what any spunky B-movie reporter does--he takes someone else's story and runs with it. He is surprised, however, when this phone call leads to him being at the scene of a murder! At first the police think the DA's daughter killed the DA but it turns out he was shot from outside...and Dustin probably saw the assailant. What follows is very familiar-- with the reporter not only being smarter than the police but solving the crime practically by himself!

While there's nothing bad about the film there also isn't all that much great about it either. Entertaining but familiar and unsophisticated viewing. The only really remarkable thing is seeing Boris Karloff playing one of the baddies just before he shot to international fame as the Frankenstein monster.

"Graft" was the film being shot at Universal in late June 1931, the time when director James Whale had taken over preproduction reins of the upcoming "Frankenstein," spotted actor Boris Karloff dining in the commissary, and remembered his powerful presence in Howard Hawks' "The Criminal Code." Karloff is very much the sole reason for bothering to watch this fleeting programmer from director Christy Cabanne, whose only genre titles both starred George Zucco, "The Mummy's Hand" in 1940 and "Scared to Death" in 1946, plus the very first Crime Club entry from 1937, "The Westland Case." Screenwriter Barry Barringer certainly did better, with Lugosi's "The Death Kiss" and "The Return of Chandu," and one of the first starring roles for future Wolf Man Creighton Chaney, Monogram's outdoor effort "Sixteen Fathoms Deep." "Graft" looks like a small scale newspaper comedy/drama in the wake of "The Front Page" and "Five Star Final," so unambitious that it runs a meager 54 minutes but offers a rare lead for longtime utility man Regis Toomey, admittedly well cast as a dimwitted would be reporter, Dustin Hotchkiss, tiring of scripting ad copy but unable to secure the major gigs scored by Herold Goodwin's Speed Hansen (not Scoop Hanlon from "The Missing Guest"), so unlike his nickname that he never brings himself to bother leaving the bleeping office! News editor E. T. Scudder (Willard Robertson) offers Hotchkiss an opportunity to interview contractor M. H. Thomas (William B. Davidson), which explodes into a major scandal once Thomas' girlfriend, Pearl Vaughan (Dorothy Revier, later reuniting with Boris in "Night World"), emerges with the determination to spill the beans about his corrupt activities on the eve of certain electoral victory. She threatens to come clean with the D. A. but top henchman Terry (Karloff) not only prevents her from keeping the appointment at his home, he himself shoots the D. A. from outside his window, bumping into the inept Hotchkiss on his way to notifying the police (inexplicably, the unwitting newshound never considers him to be the killer). With a corpse unable to prosecute and Pearl safely being transported dockside for an intended watery grave, who else but Hotchkiss should predictably come to the rescue, but only if the villains act with supreme overconfidence and utter incompetence. Even Karloff's presence isn't enough to convey any sense of danger for the protagonist, who really takes the law into his own hands by spiriting the murderer away from the cops to lead them on a merry chase to his waiting editor, welcomed as some kind of hero instead of being arrested for reckless driving and endangerment! Thankfully, the days when smarmy, clueless reporters were the norm are long gone, making this extremely dated and exasperating save for the gravitas of Boris Karloff, who would not start shooting "Frankenstein" until after a quartet of small parts in "Business and Pleasure," "Scarface," "The Yellow Ticket," and "The Guilty Generation" (this was not the beginning of his career, merely the end of a 12 year screen apprenticeship).