Manhattan Tower

I don't know what to make of the rave reviews of this movie on IMDB. They *all* praise the story, which is really awful.

I wanted to watch this movie because of curiosity about the director, Frank Strayer. He directed the early movies in the Blondie series and he was surprisingly adventurous for a b-movie director (one entry was even a musical). I was surprised that someone with so much artistic ambition was so forgotten.

Manhattan Tower may be a good explanation of why.

The movie starts very well, establishing the hustle and bustle of a skyscraper, with workers and business people toiling away and with birds-eye looks at the hectic streets below. There are quirky and original shots, most notably the way traveling through the elevator shaft is used to indicate height in the building.

Unfortunately, the movie is painfully dull, involving a bickering couple and a sleazy executive. The story is as thin as gruel, both unpersuasive and completely predictable (hence my confusion at the IMDB reviews). The acting is abysmal. The financial stuff is a bit unclear. The comic relief of the drunk guy and the pill-popping receptionist fails to work.

This, perhaps, is the difference between someone like Lewis Milestone and someone like Frank Strayer. They both liked to play with the camera, but the former understood that trick shots are nothing if you don't have a solid story behind them.

Manhattan Tower is a 102 story building that is essentially a city unto itself. Which means that it has all the problems that a small city has. Today's problem is a greedy womanizing manager of National Products Corporation named Kenneth Burns (Clay Clement). He is flat broke because he gambled his money away on bad stocks. His wife, Ann (Irene Rich), wants a divorce from him so that she can start a new life with David Whitman (Hale Hamilton), but there's no way Kenneth is going to let his meal ticket go.

Coinciding with Mr. Burns is Mary Harper (Mary Brian). She's Mr. Burns secretary and he can't keep his hands off her, much to the dislike of her fiance, Jimmy Duncan (James Hall). Fighting off Mr. Burns--or rather downplaying Mr. Burns' grabbiness because she wants to keep her job--became the least of her problems after she drained her bank account and gave it to Mr. Burns to invest. She didn't know he was loose with money and she was clearly too naive to give it much thought. The money she lost wasn't just her own, it was hers and Jimmy's to start a new life together.

Now Jimmy had two reasons to hate Mr. Burns.

Going on concurrently with the aforementioned was an attempt of the tower bank to stave off its biggest clients from withdrawing their money. If they withdrew then the bank would collapse. Dave Witman was going to try to quietly convince the bank's biggest clients to stay, but the genie got out of the bottle.

It was quite a madhouse in the Manhattan Tower, but you got the impression that everyday was a madhouse. I thought the romantic excursions of Mr. And Mrs. Burns were superfluous considering so many movies in the 30's had that element. It's almost like it was a requisite part of any script. Romantic trysts aside this was a good movie with plenty of entertainment and even a little suspense.

Free on YouTube.

This is a highly entertaining artifact from my favorite year for movies: 1932! Taking plot twists and inevitability of peril over the top, it's a fascinating drama about the inhabitants of the fictional NYC skyscraper, all hurtling to an amazing climax. The details and coincidences here, not to mention strange comic relief, is the apotheosis of specifically Depression Era filmmaking.

Many stories overlap, and the movie uses a strange style of editing that appealed to me tremendously: scenes flow from one to the next with the device of the frame moving vertically, as the screen shifts from one floor to another, quite different to watch than the usual vintage device of a horizontal wipe. Literally we are moving from one in the 102-floor building like in a doorless elevator. The actual elevators in the building are monitored by men with castanet-type clickers, making an unusual noise throughout the movie as they monitor the capacity of elevators ready to move.

Central story is about a hard-working couple saving up to get married: Mary Brian a secretary for the film's heavy Mr. Burns, played with immense evil intent by Clay Bennett, and James Hall as Mary's boyfriend, a hot-headed manager working in the building's power department. Burns ends up embezzling Mary's nest egg (which is shared by Jimmy), while he's seducing her empty-headed, mean-spirited party girl fellow secretary played delightfully (in pre-Code dirty fashion) by Noel Francis; Hale Hamilton as Whitman, the bank executive who is in love with Mrs. Burns (Iris Rich in an emotional performance), and subject to horrible blackmail from Clay; plus other employees like Nydia Westman who is a real scene-stealer as Whitman's secretary.

Westman inadvertently starts a panic run on Whitman's bank that leads to a thrilling climax that captures the near-paranoia associated with the Stock Market crash just a few years before. It's a modest film but amazing in its own way.

In its defence, nobody involved with the production of this had ever seen a motion picture before and the verb, 'to act' was not one which any of the cast had ever come across. Alternatively, this might just be inexcusably awful.

This has to be one of the worst pictures I've ever seen. That something can be this atrocious defies logic. The world is fortunate that Remington Pictures was so short-lived if this example is anything to go by. Apart from those clicking elevator noises which fascinate me in early thirties movies, the only thing which made me watch this to its absurd denouement was to satisfy my morbid curiosity to see how it managed to get increasingly worse with each passing minute. Quite an achievement.

The only picture I can think of that's worse is MURDER AT MIDNIGHT and that's also directed by this guy, Frank Stayer...hmm. OK, he uses some interesting wipes between scenes but unfortunately these lead to the scenes if you can call them that. If you want to put someone off ever watching a 1930s film, show them this.

This was a cheap rip-off of the excellent SKYSCRAPER SOULS (1932) but made apparently by amateurs. It's so awful however that it's almost insulting to real films like SKYSCRAPER SOULS to mention this in the same breath or be on the same IMDb site. Imagine you showed the Mona Lisa to a six you'd child and said 'copy that.' The child might be able to create something which looks like the real Mona Lisa but you'd hardly exhibit it in The Louvre!

Entertaining period piece, but little more. It's 1932 and neither banks nor the stock market are trusted, thanks to the financial crash of '29. On the other hand, the shots of Manhattan Tower resemble a soaring temple to the movie-makers confidence in both business and the future, despite the recent calamity. The tower shows level after rising level of bustling business people, also providing a good chance to catch ladies fashions of the day as they hustle in and out of offices. Too bad there's no glimpse of the impoverished masses that truly epitomize the age.

The plot concerns the free-wheeling industrial executive Burns who's not above using other people's hard earned cash to float his own misbegotten investments. These shenanigans eventually culminate in a run on a cash strapped Tower bank and hardship for the workers. At the same time, Burns chases anything in skirts, his beleaguered wife be darned. So how will things straighten out.

It's a low-budget, indie production with a largely lesser-known cast except for Bryan and Hall, and a few glimpses of an early Walter Brennan. The acting's okay, though, as others point out, the fistfight is amateurish, along with a cheaply done featureless sky in scenes from atop the tower. Also, the comedic scenes with the pill-popping secretary and the silly wandering drunk tell the audience that despite serious intent, it's only a movie after all. Besides, the occasionally clever innuendo provides all the chuckles needed.

Overall, as a product of its time, the cheap flick succeeds importantly in giving us a one-sided glimpse of that stressed out time in a largely entertaining way.

(In Passing-- in the year following this movie's release, namely 1933, Congress passed the New Deal's Federal Deposit Insurance legislation that insured bank deposits up to an elevated amount. The practical effect was to prevent 'bank runs' such as occur in the movie. Now depositors could rest easier if a bank got in trouble.)