Mr. Reckless

Oil worker William Eythe blows back into town. His pal Nestor Pavia prepares to shut down his restaurant, start up a food service at the oil field where Eythe will be working, and marry Barbara Britton. Pavia doesn't know the Miss Britton is about to marry him because Eythe dumped her for further fields, nor does he suspect that they still have yens for each other.

Like most Pine-Thomas productions, this has a very derivative plot, half straight out of THEY KNEW WHAT THEY WANTED, and half out of every other Edward G. Robinson movie in which he didn't play a gangster. Director Frank MacDonald starts things off with a humorous sequence in which Eythe and a taxicab crash into Pavia's diner on its last night of operation, but after that it settles into its predictable plot, with MacDonald and his cast unable to breathe much life into the story. There is some pretty good comic relief provided by Walter Catlett, Lloyd Corrigan, and Minna Gombell. The movie as a whole never surprises.