The Crowd Roars

This is the kind of old-fashioned entertainment that the studios used to churn out every week. Gorgeous Robert Taylor plays a prize fighter, Frank Morgan his moronic father, Edward Arnold a mob boss, and Maureen O'Sullvian is Arnold's beautiful daughter, who falls in love with Taylor. And hello, who wouldn't.

This is a piece very much of its time. Today, the relationship between the Tommy McCoy character as a young kid and the light heavyweight title holder Martin would be instantly suspect. How the world has changed.

The film manages to hold one's interest, especially with its exciting fight sequences. As an added treat, "Hart to Hart" co-star Lionel Stander, who played "Max," has a supporting role. I'd know that voice anywhere.

This version is 10X the quality of the later (1947) Mickey Rooney version. Even though Rooney makes some "cute" comments, the lack of "feel" for the story is apparent. Watch both and you'll agree. This version is EXCELLENT. Much better fighting scenes, too. And a definitely better love angle...

THE CROWD ROARS is a sensational boxing drama with a terrific cast at their best. Robert Taylor stars as Tommy McCoy, raised in poverty thanks to his drunken failed vaudevillian of a father, Frank Morgan. Tommy is both a choir boy and a scrapper as a child and starts to earn a little coin singing at public events like a boxing match. When he sings at an event which has kids his own age boxing, his father bets the champion's father Tommy can beat him. He does so quite impressively and becomes a little brother figure to the adult champion William Gargan, a local guy. Gargan trains Tommy who as the years go by continues to climb the ladder while Gargan has peaked and at one point is no longer active. Ultimately, Gargan returns to the ring desperate for money and has to fight his own protégé.

Tommy's skills in the ring attract the attention of gambling king Edward Arnold, to whom Tommy's father owes $600. Ultimately the shady Arnold becomes Tommy's manager and Tommy accidentally stumbles upon Arnold's secret life, with a débutante daughter (Maureen O'Sullivan) and society circles thinking Arnold is a Wall Street executive, including daughter Maureen.

This movie is terrific! There's some really good laughs in it, quite a bit of poignancy, and action non-stop. Robert Taylor is perfectly cast as a fairly gentle soul who is in the boxing racket strictly for the money and the escape from poverty. Taylor may be the most gorgeous man in pictures in his era but he's extremely believable as a boxer, with some of the best punches thrown in the ring that you will see from a bona fide movie star. Did I mention he was gorgeous? Well I had to do it again because this film revels in his masculine handsomeness, with his superb physical shape shown frequently clad only in boxing shorts and a stunning mop of thick black hair in a style remarkably contemporary. Taylor's performance is tops too, always one of the screen's greatest "honorable" guys, this is one of his very best roles and he is wonderful in it.

Excellent support comes from Edward Arnold and Frank Morgan (the latter as a character so exasperating though it takes a long time for the audience to like him). Maureen O'Sullivan is lovely in the slender role of the girl Taylor loves. The movie is also notable for no less than four against-type casting bits that work extremely well. Nat Pendleton is best known for his lovable big goon parts in scores of MGM films from the era, here he's a scary mobster Arnold attempts to double-cross. Lionel Stander, on the other hand, often played mean characters but here he's Taylor's great pal of an assistant although as sardonic as ever. Isabel Jewell, so often cast as bimbos, is effective in a small part as a grieving wife while the very young Jane Wyman scores as a dizzy southern débutante who is Maureen's best pal and has quite a crush on Taylor herself.

THE CROWD ROARS curiously has little reputation among film buffs, that's a shame because it's one of the very best films made in 1938 and has everything a classic movie lover could want, a perfect MGM picture.

There is enough plot here for five pictures (all of which were made before this one), probably to compensate for paper-thin characters and a total lack of plausibility. The script tries earnestly to justify the unmarked features of a boxer who looks exactly like the young, very handsome Robert Taylor. Dewy-eyed Maureen O'Sullivan is sent to a finishing school by her unsavory (until the end) father, gambler Edward Arnold, but manages to become involved with the fight game (and Robert Taylor) when his training camp is set up at her country home! Low-key believable performances by Lionel Stander and William Gargan are helpful, but Jane Wyman is something of an embarrassment as a flirty, Southern-drawling cutie pie, and Frank Morgan dithers and chortles his way through yet another characteristic role.

MGM had once used ad-lines which proclaimed "Garbo talks!" and "Garbo laughs!" For this movie they might have used "Robert Taylor strips!" Female fans had always swooned over the romantically handsome Taylor but men supposedly found him too much of a "pretty boy" who too often appeared in soapy costume dramas. Anxious to increase his appeal, and with Taylor's enthusiastic consent, MGM decided to toughen up their rising star's image by casting him as a prizefighter with a dark edge in a gritty (by MGM standards) boxing movie. First, the movie teases its audience by an opening twelve-and-a-half minute sequence detailing the childhood of its protagonist. (Gene Reynolds plays the young Robert Taylor). Then, ta-dah!, we see the adult protagonist, introduced with a shot of his bare, sweaty back as he works out in a boxing gym. Wait, there's more! The camera moves position and we now see Taylor's bare chest, also sweaty, complete with an inverted triangle of chest hair beginning at the collarbones and extending down to the sternum. (One imagines a make-up team carefully trimming and combing this hair to give it just the right effect.) For the next seven minutes Taylor appears bare-chested -- working out at a punching bag, retiring to a dressing room, taking a shower, appearing with a towel tied around his waist. Later in the movie he's shown soaking in a bathtub, (while reading "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire"), and then there are various boxing matches full of sweaty, face-punching action. All this "beefcake," showcased in a slick, satisfying, well-cast package, apparently did the trick because Taylor soon emerged as one of MGM's brightest and most durable stars. Curiously, Taylor rarely again took off his shirt, so if you want to see his nipples showcased in all their Hollywood glory, you better watch "The Crowd Roars."