La foule en délire

This version is 10X the quality of the later (1947) Mickey Rooney version. Even though Rooney makes some "cute" comments, the lack of "feel" for the story is apparent. Watch both and you'll agree. This version is EXCELLENT. Much better fighting scenes, too. And a definitely better love angle...

There is enough plot here for five pictures (all of which were made before this one), probably to compensate for paper-thin characters and a total lack of plausibility. The script tries earnestly to justify the unmarked features of a boxer who looks exactly like the young, very handsome Robert Taylor. Dewy-eyed Maureen O'Sullivan is sent to a finishing school by her unsavory (until the end) father, gambler Edward Arnold, but manages to become involved with the fight game (and Robert Taylor) when his training camp is set up at her country home! Low-key believable performances by Lionel Stander and William Gargan are helpful, but Jane Wyman is something of an embarrassment as a flirty, Southern-drawling cutie pie, and Frank Morgan dithers and chortles his way through yet another characteristic role.

One of the very best boxing films of the 1930's and early 1940's and very definitely much better than the 1947 remake with Mickey Roony as "Killer" McCoy. Robert Ryan looks like a light heavyweight and it looks like he can actually throw a punch. As a boxing fan I look for a sense of reality in the fights, and this film has it.

However, the best part of the film are the performances, especially Frank Morgan (the wizard in the 1939, Judy Garland version of "The Wizard of Oz"). Other notable performances are turned in by a young Lionel Stander as the killer's trainer (TV fans will remember him from Hart to Hart). Young and handsome Eddy Arnold is excellent as the gambler/manager. Maureen O'Sullivan carries off the role of the young, college girl love interest with the same innocence she displayed when she broke into films 9 years and 39 films earlier. It's quite a contrast to the more adult roles she was playing at the time.

Director Richard Thorpe captures the atmosphere of the boxing ring and the gambling world quite convincingly. His attention to detail and experience (this is his 120th film) are quite evident, though necessarily the most imaginative. While the film IS superior to the 1947 remake, the director of that film, Roy Rowland, does a much better job of showing the crowd's blood lust in the 8th round of the final fight.

After a bunch of early films where Robert Taylor was playing both modern and costumed romantic leads, taking full advantage of his extraordinary good looks, Robert Taylor asked for some more rugged type roles. Louis B. Mayer's answer to his most cooperative of stars was to cast him first in A Yank At Oxford and then in The Crowd Roars.

In the first film, Taylor rowed crew for dear old Oxford where he was a matriculating student. But in The Crowd Roars he's even more rugged as a boxer. The role was chosen for him so he could have lots of opportunities to go bare-chested and show that in fact he's got hair on his chest. Taylor himself made that comment and back in those more innocent days it was to show he was not a powderpuff as if having follicles on your anterior was proof of that.

Overlooked in this hairy situation was the fact that Robert Taylor got a very fine role for himself as a boxer determined to make a quick buck and get out as fast as possible before becoming a punch drunk rummy. He's had poor and he's had rich and rich was better. Back when he was poor he was living hand to mouth with a near do well father, Frank Morgan, and a gentle mother who took in washing because her husband couldn't hold down a job. Taylor's mother in The Crowd Roars was played by Emma Dunn in a brief, but very telling role.

Anyway when young Gene Reynolds grows up to be Robert Taylor he's now supporting dear old dad who's still drinking and gambling. Those two habits are nearly the undoing of his son when he falls into the hands of rival gamblers Edward Arnold and Nat Pendleton. The usual bumbling oaf that Frank Morgan portrays on screen is played far more serious here. It's one of Frank Morgan's best screen roles.

Arnold has his secrets also, his daughter Maureen O'Sullivan and her ditzy friend Jane Wyman think Arnold is a stockbroker, as if that wasn't also gambling. Taylor in courting Sullivan does not disillusion her.

Look for another good performance by William Gargan as a former Light Heavyweight champion who takes an interest in young Gene Reynolds and Lionel Stander as Gargan's trainer and later Taylor's trainer.

The Crowd Roars is a fine film from MGM that went a long way in expanding Robert Taylor's range as thespian.

And we proved he had hair on his chest.

MGM had once used ad-lines which proclaimed "Garbo talks!" and "Garbo laughs!" For this movie they might have used "Robert Taylor strips!" Female fans had always swooned over the romantically handsome Taylor but men supposedly found him too much of a "pretty boy" who too often appeared in soapy costume dramas. Anxious to increase his appeal, and with Taylor's enthusiastic consent, MGM decided to toughen up their rising star's image by casting him as a prizefighter with a dark edge in a gritty (by MGM standards) boxing movie. First, the movie teases its audience by an opening twelve-and-a-half minute sequence detailing the childhood of its protagonist. (Gene Reynolds plays the young Robert Taylor). Then, ta-dah!, we see the adult protagonist, introduced with a shot of his bare, sweaty back as he works out in a boxing gym. Wait, there's more! The camera moves position and we now see Taylor's bare chest, also sweaty, complete with an inverted triangle of chest hair beginning at the collarbones and extending down to the sternum. (One imagines a make-up team carefully trimming and combing this hair to give it just the right effect.) For the next seven minutes Taylor appears bare-chested -- working out at a punching bag, retiring to a dressing room, taking a shower, appearing with a towel tied around his waist. Later in the movie he's shown soaking in a bathtub, (while reading "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire"), and then there are various boxing matches full of sweaty, face-punching action. All this "beefcake," showcased in a slick, satisfying, well-cast package, apparently did the trick because Taylor soon emerged as one of MGM's brightest and most durable stars. Curiously, Taylor rarely again took off his shirt, so if you want to see his nipples showcased in all their Hollywood glory, you better watch "The Crowd Roars."