Edmund Lowe and Victor MacLaglen as Quirt and Flagg are back! Hear them talk -- actually, hear Maclaglen shout all his lines. Watch as they slang each other around the world, from Vladivostock to Brooklyn and some unnamed banana republic! See them get snookered by women of all nationalities, especially Lili Damita as a Meso-American senorita! Be annoyed by El Brendel!
And so forth. Fox got Maxwell Anderson and Lawrence Stalling to put their names on this to lend it some authenticity as a sequel; although it's credited as being from a play "Tropic Twins" which they co-wrote, it seems to have gone unproduced. Despite some troubles with line readings and the sound equipment -- or perhaps it was the print I saw, which seemed to be pieced together from eight different battered copies -- director Raoul Walsh does a good job of keeping this film running along. Arthur Edeson clearly deserves some words of praise; the battle sequence which highlights the movie was done wild as a series of tracking shots. Even more, there's some camera movement for composition, and there's a cut and shift of camera angle during a song that indicates some ability to edit the sound track. The swearing that lip-readers reported from WHAT PRICE GLORY? was replaced with the leads sneering at each other and saying "Sez you!" Miss Damita gets to show a lot of leg as she hops alternately on their knees.
This was wildly successful, grossing a reputed $350,000 during its first two weeks at the Roxy Theater. It doubtless contributed to Fox' corporate profits of $13,500,000 that year. There was, as yet, no sign of the Great Depression, even if Mr. Fox had gotten injured in a car crash and the Justice Department was fighting his takeover of MGM.
