Wildcat Bus

An evil granny gangsta tries to bring down Fay Wray's family busing business. Light comedy, romance, and harrowing vintage bus crashes, but not enough juice to fill your glass.

Fay Wray, years after her big film King Kong. She runs a bus line with her dad, but lately mysterious things have been happening to their buses, causing them to break down and get in accidents. Charles Lang is Jerry Waters, who needs money fast, so he applies as a bus driver. but gets caught up in a syndicate that transports people in private cars without a license. the script is not great. story is just silly. and some of the acting is pretty iffy. was transporting people around without a license really a big problem in 1940? maybe so. this one wasn't anyone's best work! it's just a shortie from RKO, at 64 minutes. Directed by Frank Woodruff. he only directed eleven films. three of em in 1940, and this was one of them. written by Lou Lusty. he also produced two Annabel films with Lucille Ball!

This rather poor RKO programmer manages to keep some interest going, mostly due to Fay Wray, who struggles with the poor material, but who is canny enough to make the most of her close-ups, and to Paul Guilefoyle who is pretty good is his supporting role as the hot-tempered moral center of the piece. Leading man -- actually, leading chump -- Charles Lang suggests, if anyone, a rather clueless Dan Duryea.

The plot, about a struggling bus line, owned by Miss Wray's father and run by her, despite the efforts by wildcatters to put it out of business by faking accidents, has hints of screwball comedy about it at some points, but it is rarely played for laughs. Lang, the newly indigent ex-playboy, is down to his last limousine, which has its potential, but the effect is not funny, merely incongruous. Not a terrible piece to watch, but not to go out of your way for.

Wildcat Bus (1940)

** (out of 4)

Warner made a crime picture about taxi drivers in the entertaining TAXI! so I guess RKO thought they'd push the envelope by making a crime picture with bus drivers. This film, however, is pretty dull from start to finish. In the film a playboy (Charles Lang) goes bankrupt so he has to get a job at a bus company ran by a woman (Fay Wray) and her father. The bus company has had all sorts of accidents that are ruining their company but they begin to think that it's racketeers running a taxi service that's trying to steal their business. This RKO picture runs a very brief 63-minutes but at times it feels doubt that length. The biggest problem is the rather bland direction that puts very little life into the picture. The screenplay really doesn't help matters either as all the characters are pretty one-dimensional and none are overly interesting. The bad guys are carbon copies of what you'd see in a Warner picture and the good guys are just boring and constantly saying bad jokes. Lang is okay in his role but the screenplay pretty much lets his character done as at times he's annoying and it's really hard to care too much for him. Wray is pretty much going by the numbers but once again, a lot of this could be blamed on the screenplay or direction. Paul Guilfoyle, Don Costello, Paul McGrath and Joe Sawyer round out the supporting players. There's very little energy to anything in the film as the entire story just feels forced and it's just not interesting enough to carry the short running time. The ending picks up a few punches as we get a big fight sequence with plenty of punches and kicks.

Looking more like it came from "B" action specialist Breezy Eason at Warners than little-known Frank Woodruff at RKO, this quickie little time-filler about crooked limo drivers trying to drive a bus company out of business accomplished what it set out to do, no more or no less. The script is serviceable, at best, if too talky at times, and leading man Charles Lang--in only his second picture--is rather colorless and bland and has no chemistry whatever with star Fay Wray, though she tries hard. There's some action on the road, and if you're a vintage-car enthusiast you'll really like all the shiny new--at the time--Packards, Chevys and other models sprinkled throughout the picture, and there's a pretty good though brief brawl near the end. Wray is still as beautiful and sexy as she was seven years earlier in "King Kong" and, as other reviewers have stated, is probably the best reason to watch this picture. It's OK, nothing more, and a decent way to pass the time. Nothing special, though.