Mr. Reckless

The world of the oilfields and the grand opera are about as disparate as you can get. But this Pine-Thomas production from Paramount has some similar plot lines as MGM's Maytime.

William Eythe has come home, he's an oil field roustabout traveling any place at anytime when a new oil field opens up with jobs. All that has made him Mr. Reckless, Eythe will do just about anything on a dare. But one thing he won't do is settle down and girl friend Barbara Britton is tired of waiting. She's decided to marry Nestor Paiva who owns a traveling eatery that caters to the oil field workers. You can imagine how Eythe takes the news, especially since he's friends with Paiva as well.

Mr. Reckless is one well oiled melodrama ending with the inevitable clash between Eythe and Paiva. Some nice location shots of the work at the oil drills and a patriotic coda as to how oil will save the world. In the 66 years between this film and now that's certainly been the case.

NOT.

Star William Eythe only made two more films after this, and died of hepatits at the age of 38. Eythe is "Jeff", oil field worker, who checks up on his old girl friend, and decides to try to get her back. Co-stars the awesome Walter Catlett and Barbara Britton. This one fell into public doman, but the version i saw on Moonlight Movies was actually pretty good condition. It's a Paramount short shortie, at 66 minutes, but they pack a lot into that time. Jeff is determined to show off in the oil fields to win his girlfriend back. It's okay, and since it's a B short film, it's on Moonlight Movies channel. Another Pine Thomas Production, for Paramount. Directed by Frank McDonald, king of the westerns, about half way through his directing career. Pretty solid story, if a little slow-moving.

Oil worker William Eythe blows back into town. His pal Nestor Pavia prepares to shut down his restaurant, start up a food service at the oil field where Eythe will be working, and marry Barbara Britton. Pavia doesn't know the Miss Britton is about to marry him because Eythe dumped her for further fields, nor does he suspect that they still have yens for each other.

Like most Pine-Thomas productions, this has a very derivative plot, half straight out of THEY KNEW WHAT THEY WANTED, and half out of every other Edward G. Robinson movie in which he didn't play a gangster. Director Frank MacDonald starts things off with a humorous sequence in which Eythe and a taxicab crash into Pavia's diner on its last night of operation, but after that it settles into its predictable plot, with MacDonald and his cast unable to breathe much life into the story. There is some pretty good comic relief provided by Walter Catlett, Lloyd Corrigan, and Minna Gombell. The movie as a whole never surprises.

Spotty 1948 programmer. On the whole, the mix of humor and oil well theatrics fails to achieve much impact. Events simply follow one another without really building. Too bad, for example, that Hugo's slow drowning from being trapped in an oil tank is not played up. The tension in that sort of setup is maximo to say the least. Then too Corrigan's comedic antics as Hugo are too often overdone and don't blend that well. I suspect the overall results were aimed at a mostly youthful audience. Also, it looks like the plot of blue-collar workers vying for the same girl is borrowed from such betters as Flowing Gold (1940) and Manpower (1941). But those were studio produced with much bigger budgets and stars than this indie production. Frankly, I tuned in to catch the sparkly Barbara Britton of TV's Mr. & Mrs. North in movie form. Trouble is her tag-along character Betty is pretty grim-faced throughout. In fact, I hardly recognized her. Anyway, there's a few good oil field scenes, while the few process shots are not obvious. Nonetheless, the 70-minutes amounts to a standard programmer and little more. Maybe for a slow evening, at best.

William Eythe heads the cast in the pretty unremarkable little drama as "Lundy". He is a bit of a cock-sure oil worker who returns home to find that his erstwhile girlfriend "Betty" (Barbara Britton) has gone and gotten herself engaged to his older friend "Gus" (Nestor Paiva). Determined to win her back, he demonstrates how he earned his eponymous nickname with almost catastrophic results for just about everyone! At times it is quite a light-hearted affair, with a decent enough supporting cast working hard to keep the derivative storyline just a little bit interesting, but largely this is a standard afternoon feature that I doubt I will remember this time next week.