L'Entraîneuse fatale

"Manpower", made for Warner Bros. in 1941, is one of the most exciting and pleasurable of all classic action adventures. It's great to see the positive reviews from fellow users; I have been looking forward to it for some time and I finally saw it. What a picture! I'm a huge Raoul Walsh fan and "Manpower" ranks with the director's greatest works - "Me and My Gal", "The Roaring Twenties", "Gentleman Jim", "The Strawberry Blonde", "Objective, Burma", "Pursued", et al. The film is extraordinary for a number of reasons, but the most obvious reason is a top notch cast: Edward G. Robinson, Marlene Dietrich, George Raft, Ward Bond, Alan Hale, Eve Arden, and the lovable Frank McHugh, performing his hilarious shenanigans and slapstick.

The film concerns a group of emergency power repairmen who work on a high voltage power lines during ferocious storms. Throughout "Manpower", Walsh emphasizes group camaraderie and the strong bond of working class Americans. It is also filled with Walsh's trademark boyish gusto and unsophisticated Irish ribaldry, but it somehow lacks the bittersweet nostalgia and wistfulness of "Strawberry Blonde" and "Gentleman Jim".

The same way Walsh's "Strawberry Blonde" is a remake of a charming 1933 Gary Cooper vehicle called "One Sunday Afternoon", "Manpower" is a remake of Howard Hawks'1932 adventure "Tiger Shark", also starring Edward G. Robinson as a tuna fisherman. Here, Robinson plays power lineman who happens to be in love with an ex-con girl, sensitively played by Marlene Dietrich. Robinson's rival is George Raft and their climactic aerial duel amidst jolting electric wires are among the highlights of the film's stunning action scenes.

Edward G. Robinson and George Raft are a couple of linemen. Robinson is the foreman of the crew and a bit of a lug when it comes to the opposite sex. Raft however is a smooth operator.

They both meet Marlene Dietrich at a clip joint, the Code euphemism for a bordello. Robinson falls for her and Dietrich's looking for a way out of the working life. They marry, but she starts getting a yen for Raft and that brings on trouble.

Manpower has a place in film history having nothing to do with the content or the quality of the movie. While visiting his good buddy George Raft on the set, one Benjamin Siegel was introduced to Virginia Hill as depicted in the film Bugsy. There's a scene where Raft gets into a brawl with Barton MacLane that is depicted in Bugsy.

And if that wasn't enough, Raft and Robinson got into a real brawl over Marlene just like in the film. It seems as though Dietrich was involved with Raft during the production. But Raft was not the most educated of men.

Edward G. Robinson came from a slum background like Raft, but he'd educated himself and in fact was a well known art collector. Dietrich was no dummy herself and she and Eddie got friendly on the set, talking about stuff that Raft didn't have a clue about. Of course this got George jealous and they had a knock down drag out over her. You couldn't buy that kind of publicity. Lucky for Robinson Raft didn't call on Ben Siegel for his services.

So Manpower entered its place in Hollywood lore. Too bad the film wasn't any great masterpiece. It's entertaining enough though with a good cast of Warner Brothers regulars supporting Ms. Dietrich and her gentlemen friends. It seems though just about every film Warners made back then had either Alan Hale or Frank McHugh in it, in this case both. They're always entertaining. Add to that Eve Arden in her usual role as the wisecracking best friend of the heroine.

Not the greatest film ever made, but a historic one and not bad on the entertainment scale.

Manpower, is typical of the Warner Bros. action films of the 40's. It's filled with drama, tension, comedy and action. There is a lot of memorable dialogue, which puts modern films to shame. Probably, the best feature of this film is the cast. Dietrich, Robinson and Raft are topnotch. The supporting cast of Alan Hale, Frank McHugh, and Ward Bond lend superb comic relief. Manpower is a fun film which deserves repeated viewings.

I wonder how much more than two seconds it took to come up with this movie's title as we tag along with a ragtag group of electrical linemen tasked with keeping America's lights on through fair weather and foul (and is there ever a lot of foul, going by what happens here). Heading up the team are best-buddies George Raft and Edward G Robinson with as female interest, an added dollop of Marlene Dietrich on the side, a cast you'd think think screams gangster flick, although to be fair this particular occupation seems a whole lot more dangerous, despite being on the right side of the law.

Anyway, the characterisations, such as they are, are these. Robinson is the hot-headed, girl-chasing pocket rocket while Raft, his best mate and minder is the dapper, level-headed one. With their unruly but largely good-natured colleagues, including most prominently Alan Hale and Frank McHugh as a goofy double act on the side, they're on perpetual call-out when something happens to disrupt the national grid, usually it seems a ferocious storm of biblical proportions. When one of the vets on the team comes a predictable cropper on site, he asks Raft and Robinson to look after his adult daughter, Dietrich, who's just been released from prison and promptly returns to waitressing at a seedy clip-joint where she and the other young women, including Eve Arden are expected to fleece the ever more intoxicated clientele.

Eddie takes to the girl immediately so much so that he soon proposes to her even though she's not attracted to him. George on the other hand finds that the "treat 'em mean, keep 'em keen," caveman-approach works better because soon enough, despite his treating Marlene with suspicion, disdain and even a dose of physical violence, of course it's him she falls for, predicating the triangle which sure enough will break by the film's climax, as the duo fight it out at 50 feet atop live electricity lines with Dietrich looking on from below.

It's all high-flying nonsense of course. The attitudes to women throughout are Neanderthal with any "dame" in a skirt fair game for a manhandling, be they nurses, costumiers or waitresses. The work the guys do too would keep Health and Safety in work for decades, there's such disregard for personal wellbeing, it's no wonder fatalities are commonplace. I also didn't enjoy the puerile antics of Hale and McHugh finding them old-fashioned and unfunny.

Raoul Walsh does his usual breakneck, man's world direction job, which means there's lots of testosterone, bonhomie, and fisticuffs, Raft and Robinson do their best in their exaggerated roles while Dietrich seems to be acting in a different film all together, all cliches of the hard-boiled working girl softened by an even tougher male played out one more time.

I suspect that the movie's heart might have started out in the right place as being masculine, knockabout entertainment but really its outdated treatment of the women in the cast is quite offensive at times and fatally wings a film that I don't think is any anywhere near to being a career highlight for either the distinguished director or his equally distinguished cast.

This original screenplay from writers Richard Macaulay and Jerry Wald is essentially a drama about California linesmen for the power company, two of whom (Edward G. Robinson and George Raft) get tangled up over a sultry woman just out of the pen (and a recent graduate of a local clip joint). Uneasily cast film with overlays of raucous comedy, brotherly roughhousing, static adventure...but oddly, no romance. Robinson and Marlene Dietrich end up married, but the union seems loveless (she's indifferent to him, while he stays mostly hungover). Dietrich sings one colorless tune and seems to fight a case of the blahs. Special effects are good, but the mostly male supporting cast quickly tire the ear with would-be lascivious stories of 'dames' and 'babes'. Eve Arden has some funny one-liners playing Marlene's hostess co-hort, and there's a wild bit of satire set in a hash-joint. **1/2 from ****