King for a Night

If I were to use 30's movies to get an idea of what sports were the most watched I'd say it was college football, horse racing, and boxing. I've seen more movies featuring those three sports than any other. In "King for a Night" Bud Williams (Chester Morris) got into boxing. He was always fighting anyway so he may as well have been getting paid to do it.

Bud's biggest problem was his ego. He had an oversized ego before he even stepped into a ring. His other problem was his temper. It got him into several fights and even led him to slapping the woman he was on a date with. If he stopped at slapping it would've been enough, but he carried it so far as to kick her out of her OWN car and make her walk back home. He didn't allow her to walk back home as he'd threatened, but it was clear he was a bully.

Bud was on a path of being a pretty despicable character until his sister Lillian (Helen Twelvetrees) got into trouble. It was then that he showed what true character he had underneath his gruff exterior.

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This is one of those films where the characters have to explain what their character are like because that's easier than doing it through acting. This is despite the whole first half hour being devoted to an exceptionally dull back story meant to give us an insight into everyone.

It's pretty professionally put together and the acting is natural and realistic (even from Alice White) but you don't feel inclined to want to get to know these people. Since this picture only works if it tugs at your emotions, because you can't engage with the characters or care anything whatsoever for them, it fails badly. Chester Morris's 'Bud' simply isn't likeable because he's not been written as a believable credible person. His 'sister' played by Helen Twelvetrees is similarly unrealistic so when this sweet country girl suddenly becomes a saucy dancer in her new sugar-daddy gangster's nightclub you can't even be bothered to question the absurdity of it.

Director Kurt Neumann who will go on to great things, does his best with a poorly conceived story but because he doesn't let you engage with his characters, the result is sheer blandness. Even with ever increasingly seedy goings on, murder and self-sacrifice, astonishingly the excitement levels are zero. It's a grey and soulless film which you'll forget you've seen almost immediately.

Dated melodrama with a good cast. The situations and dialogue are what hurt this film. The ending is memorable though. Still worth a peek if you can find it.

While it is not impossible, making a good film where the leading character is a jerk is a very tall order. In a few cases, such as a biography about Hitler, it's a must as well as films like "The Godfather", but generally folks want to like and connect with the leads in a film...especially in films from the same era as "King for a Night". Unfortunately, Bud Williams (Chester Morris) is a jerk....a braggart who just loves to punch people...both inside and outside the ring.

Bud is the black sheep of the family, as his father is a respectable minister. Much of the film Bud is torn between trying (not very hard) to be respectable and trying to live his own life as a boxer. At the same time, his sister is kind of wicked....following in some of Bud's ways (though she wasn't slap-happy and violent like Bud). So, when she ends up murdering someone, Bud decides to take credit for it because his family already is embarrassed by him. Does this make a lot of sense...well, not really.

The bottom line is that when the murder occurred, which was supposed to be the big climax, I found I didn't care. Bud didn't do it but he was a jerk...and I found myself even laughing at the finale because it seemed so unreal and silly. Overall, a misfire...and the script was just not up to snuff.

Chester Morris is a small town boy with a temper and a right hook. His father, clergyman Grant Mitchell, loves him, but worries, of course, particularly when Morris heads off to New York to become, in his own mind, World Middleweight Boxing Champion. Morris starts a cocksure courtship of chorine Alice White. Soon his kid sister, Helen Twelvetrees shows up and joins the chorus line. Club owner and fight promoter John Miljan takes a shine to her, and woos her roughly. On the day of Morris' championship fight, Miss Twelvetrees shoots Miljan. Morris shows up seconds later, and takes the blame for the murder.

It's a well constructed and well performed pre-code movie, with a lot of depth in the script, with the loving relationship between Morris, his sister, and their father, Mitchell at the heart of it. Mitchell gets the big scene at the end, and offers a quiet, telling performance. He best known for his performances in more than a hundred movies in the 1930s and 1940s as pompous, authoritarian blowhards, but this performer had a real range. He made a couple of appearances in the silent era, but his movie career began in earnest in 1930, when he was already in his mid-fifties. Before then he had been in more than 30 Broadway productions dating back to 1902, in a wide variety of works, ranging from Shakespeare to Fitch and George M. Cohan. His last movie appearance was in 1948, and he died nine years later, a month shy of eighty-one.