High Pressure

William Powell has his latest company to promote when Frank McHugh and George Sidney bring him a man with a process to turn garbage into rubber.... except they can't find the man.

It's based on a Broadway comedy, and Powell gives an air of setting the pace with his stately flow of words and broad gestures, while Warner's large company of contract players, including Frank McHugh, Guy Kibbee.... well, everyone, it seems except Cagney, Arliss, O'Brien, and Joan Blondell show up to take or be taken. It's so chock full of character comedians that leading lady and second-billed Evelyn Brent gets about four minutes of screen time.

The pace lets up in the final twenty minutes, as often happens with comedies; after all, there's a plot to be resolved. However the first half hour is tremendously funny.

I'm not sure what Warner Brothers thought they'd be doing with William Powell when they signed him between his stints at Paramount and MGM. Here he's in a film that probably James Cagney was offered and rejected.

Not that High Pressure doesn't have its moments. In fact it's pretty funny in a lot of spots. But I hardly think that even Powell would waste his time and flirt with fraud by trying to sell synthetic rubber made from sewage.

The film opens with George Sidney and Frank McHugh trying to locate Powell off on a Prohibition style toot. They find him dead drunk in a speakeasy and spend some time trying to sober him up. Why? Because Powell has the reputation of putting over schemes with his High Pressure sales tactics. As a motivational speaker Powell anticipates the get rich quick schemes that start in the Eighties by fifty years.

As I said, it's synthetic rubber made from sewage. George Sidney has discovered a doctor with a formula for it played by Harry Beresford. Instead of getting away as fast he could, Powell gets entranced with the idea. He embarks on a sales campaign to beat all and sells thousands of shares of stock in this company. Then he's got to produce.

All this while his girl friend Evelyn Brent is tired of the carousel and just wants out of the relationship. Powell's going to have to do plenty to salvage this situation.

Naturally this whole thing is a fraud and how the partners Powell, Sidney, and McHugh discover it is the heart of the whole movie. I wouldn't dare reveal it.

There's a very nice performance by Guy Kibbee whose function in the group is to be Powell's perennial front for the various schemes he's involved in. He's made the company figurehead president and his job is to go around and speak and present a respectable front. In that role Kibbee is the Warren Harding of the business world, an army of pompous phrases in search of an idea.

Though I liked it in spots, High Pressure is ultimately too silly to be cast as a great screen comedy. And William Powell does a good job in a role that either James Cagney or Pat O'Brien would have phoned in the performance. In fact seeing Powell in this, I'm not so sure that wasn't the reason Warner Brothers would soon sign Pat O'Brien.

Oddly enough synthetic rubber would soon be a reality forced on us by World War II. It was not made of sewage though.

William Powell is at his peak in this madcap financial comedy. His high-voltage energy eclipses the other actors, although most are more than competent. From the brief synopsis I read, I was expecting more of a screwball comedy, centering on the relationship between Powell and Evelyn Brent. The movie turned out to be more of a hard-hitting satire, focussing on the deep economic troubles of 1932. How funny is it to hear references to "bank presidents committing suicide"? Evelyn Brent seems completely mismatched to Powell. Totally lacking charisma in this movie, she seems more like a depressed, real-life person than the incandescent beauty without whom Powell cannot perform his flimflam miracles. Great movie for Powell fans, but seems a bit too much of a history lesson, overall. Slightly risqué pre-Code touches are entertaining.

High Pressure (1932)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

Nice comedy from Warner has William Powell playing Gar Evans, a fast-talking promoter who builds up interest in a company that claims to be able to make rubber out of sewage. Soon Evans gets everything in place except for the inventor of this special rubber who has gone missing. With his neglected girlfriend (Evelyn Brent) about to leave him and still no inventor in sight, the entire thing appears to be a scam. It's funny to think that Warner pretty much let Powell walk away to MGM because they felt he was getting too old and yet it would turn out that the high points of his career were just about to happen. This film here certainly isn't a classic and while there are many problems with the actual story I think the cast members are so good that you can't help but recommend it to their fans. It should go without saying but this is the type of role that Powell could play in his sleep. The fast-talking con man who has plenty of charm and wit. Powell has no problem doing the part and he manages to make you care for the character even if he does things that you might not agree with. George Sidney plays the man who brings Powell the scheme and he too is very effective as is Frank McHugh who plays his typical supporting role. Apparently Powell fought to get Brent the role here and while she's not too bad I do think that one problem with the screenplay is the entire relationship between the two. There's actually very little chemistry between Powell and Brent and I'd say some of this might be blamed on the screenplay because there's just not enough spark to their relationship. With a satire like this it's common for there to be mostly dialogue. For the most part the spoken words are funny but I still thought that a majority of the jokes fell flat. There were a few darker gags that worked including a bit about there being a bank president shortage because all of them were killing themselves. Obviously this was a joke aimed at the hard times the country was in when the film was made. HIGH PRESSURE isn't a classic and it's not really a good film but fans of the cast will want to check it out.

High pressure was based on the play "Hot Money" by Aben Kandel. Seems to be the first thing he did in "show biz"... The leads, William Powell, Evelyn Brent, George Sidney, Evalyn Knapp had all been making films for years, although Powell is probably best known for the "Thin Man" series, a couple years after this one. The girlfriend, lovely, 25 year old Knapp certainly was a busy girl; she was in twelve films in 1932 alone! Lots of clever jokes written into this con-man farce, and the timing is great. Show has a fast pace, mixups like taxi-drivers and taxidermists, and fun characters like Alison Skipworth , who plays the rich, silly Mrs. Miller, (who had worked with W.C. Fields on FOUR films... I was guessing she might have worked with the Marx brothers, but it appears not) They all keep this Warner Brothers shortie (72 minutes) moving right along! A jealous girlfriend, a competitor, Mr. Banks, and the Attorney General all keep Gar Evans (Powell) on his toes. Of course, what madcap show is complete without a zany professor?? Can Powell get out of trouble with the law? and it all stays pretty clean, in spite of being made prior to enforcement of the Hays code. Fun!