"Becka - always Becka - demure, distracting, bewildering."
Talk about a kitchen sink of a movie. The protagonist is a young man who has grown up not knowing the identity of his birth father, and loses his mother and stepfather in a boating accident on the East River. He makes his way into the city, where after being roughed up on the streets, is taken in by a Jewish family, whose daughter he develops an attraction towards. Due to his prowess with his fists, he starts out boxing, but his real aspirations are to be an architect and engineer. Naturally, he eventually meets and begin working for his birth father, a wealthy man who can help him, but only the older man knows of their true relationship.
There is quite a bit of melodrama built on top of that very Victorian premise, as if Allan Dwan was trying to eke as much action and emotion out of every scenario. Aside from a boxing match in the ring, there are five brawls interspersed throughout the film, and an attempted rape. There are two love triangles which form, as the pair we're rooting for gets pulled apart, and (of course) there are issues with their subsequent romances. There is also a perilous cave-in at a construction site, an ocean liner which sinks in the Atlantic after hitting an iceberg, and a police raid at a speakeasy, the latter two of which involve gunplay. This film wants to be many different genres (even tossing in some comedy too), and would have been better off simplifying.
It doesn't have a cast filled with big stars, but I liked it for that, as buff George O'Brien and cute Virginia Valli are wonderfully natural here, and had chemistry. The moments of the two of them bashfully flirting, like when she's up on that ladder revealing her legs, are nice, and I wish the film had developed more of them. I liked these little things more than all the big action moments - another was the humorous scene where his buddy acted like his bride-to-be. Well, maybe I should caveat that by saying that the chaos that ensued after the ocean liner hit the iceberg was gripping, and also fascinating in light of its recency to the Titanic sinking. Lastly, we also get some beautiful footage of the city of New York, which is a co-star in its own right. This one went all over the place, but it was worth checking out.
