Graft

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.

A young reporter investigates the murder of a District Attorney on the eve of a big election. The film Boris Karloff was making when he was awarded the career changing role of Frankenstein's monster suffers from one of those relentlessly chirpy heroes (Regis Toomey) you feel like strangling by the third reel. Given his gangling frame, it's odd that Karloff was repeatedly cast in these criminal sidekick roles, but he's inarguably the best thing about an otherwise routine crime thriller that's ably directed by the prolific Christy Cabanne

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.

Regis Toomey, as the eager but not necessarily able reporter Dustin Hotchkiss, is playing this one somewhat slow-witted on purpose, much like any film role you'd see Don Knotts in some thirty years later. Hotchkiss' boss, tired of him whining about wanting a real story, sends him out to interview the head of the local machine and crime syndicate, certain that the threats and general unpleasantness he'll meet when he gets there will shut him up for awhile and keep him happy writing obituaries and wedding announcements. Unfortunately, what does happen is Hotchkiss becomes the witness to the aftermath of the murder of the D.A by a hit-man for the syndicate (Karloff as Terry), and he draws all of the wrong conclusions. Seeing the daughter of the reform candidate standing over the body, he rushes back to his paper and implicates her in the story he writes. When the police investigate, they determine the girl (Sue Carol) could not have done it since the bullets came from outside of the D.A.'s home. However, the papers claiming she's involved have already gone out for sale to the public. Embarrassed by the mess he's made for the reform candidate by getting his daughter wrongfully caught up in a scandal, Hotchkiss embarks on a crusade to find the real killer, although he has only two days to do so before the election in which the reform candidate is pitted against a candidate that is the puppet of the crime syndicate.

If Hotchkiss has a chance against these guys it is only because the syndicate's reasoning skills seem to be as bone-headed as Hotchkiss'. For example, Pearl, the ex-girlfriend of the crime machine's boss who has all the dirt on the mob, threatens to talk to the D.A - and does. Instead of taking her for a ride the old-fashioned way they decide to lock her up in a comfy compartment on a yacht until after the election. However, they shoot the D.A. dead in his own home when he threatens to indict, which is an empty threat without Pearl's testimony. Any mobster would tell you that the killing of honest public officials in their own middle-class neighborhoods can't be good for business.

Karloff is outstanding as Terry, the muscle and hit-man of the syndicate. He's smooth yet menacing and the perfect sociopath. He isn't angry at his victims, it's just all in a day's work. This would be an OK but rather unremarkable crime drama without his performance.

"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).