High Pressure

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.

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.

This is an easy film to forget if it weren't for yet another very nice performance by William Powell. In fact, without Powell there just wouldn't be much of a film as he single-handedly carries the movie. And, for that reason, it's a decent time-passer worth seeing.

Powell plays a sharp-talking salesman type--a guy who can sell practically anything to anyone. While he's been pretty willing to hawk just about anything, this time he becomes excited as this time he starts to believe in the product--a new synthetic rubber. But, over the course of the film, he starts to realize that all his VERY high-pressure salesmanship might just be for what could be an outright fraud. What's he to do? In many ways, this film is reminiscent of "Boiler Room", as in part of the film you see a huge room filled with slicksters on the phone--saying just about anything to sell shares in this company. Interesting and worth seeing.

boiler room

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!

William Powell stars as Gar Evans, a fast talking "promoter". He gets to make an entrance in this film, as the first part of it is Gar's partner Mike Donahey (Frank McHugh) looking all over town for him. The reason is that a man (George Sidney as Mr. Ginsburg) has a contact who says he can make rubber out of sewage, and since the idea is one that nobody would take seriously, a promoter is needed to put this new startup company before the public in a serious way. Gar believes that Ginsburg's statements are true, but goes about decorating the new "company" behind it with exaggerations such as putting the company in a grand suite of offices it does not need, employing an army of salesmen who have nothing to sell at this point, hiring a professional CEO who often lives on skid row between Gar's CEO gigs, etc. Of course behind all of this is the belief that the day will come when there is something to sell, that the stock will be worth something, and that there will be rubber manufactured. Complications ensue as Gar treads on the edge of legality.

William Powell's romantic interest in this film is played by Evelyn Brent, and I rather wonder why. Brent was never under contract to Warner Brothers as frequent costar Kay Francis was, and sound had brought her previously lucrative silent film career to a halt. Brent did not have a terrible accent like some of the old silent stars, but she did speak in a rather lifeless monotone which is especially noticeable when you are up against Warner Brothers' stock company as she is here. Maybe Powell was trying to give his old Paramount colleague's career a needed boost?

Although William Powell in topic comedic form makes this movie, special recognition needs to go to George Sidney as the "owner" of the rubber company. He spends the entire film trying to keep pace with Powell's spiel, and he is constantly muttering pointed quips or confused questions in his Jewish dialect just to drive that point home.