They Never Come Back

Regis Toomey is a boxer on his way to the top. When his left arm is damaged, his career is over. He becomes a bouncer at Earle Foxe's night club, falls for Dorothy Sebastian, and rouses Foxe's ire over it. Foxe has Dorothy's brother, Edward Landon, frame him and put him in jail.

It's a well-shot little drama, directed by Fred C. Newmeyer. Yakima Canutt is Toomey's stunt double, and the boxng sequences are undercranked and first rate. So why do I think this isn't a particularly good movie?

It's Regis Toomey. He was a capable, hardworking actor. With his young-old face and simple delivery, he was often cast as the nice guy, as he is here. The trouble is that he isn't particularly charismatic on the screen, so a few years later, he was blocked from real stardom because MGM had Jimmy Stewart, and Fox had Henry Fonda, and they pretty much burnt up all the air for that sort of role. He continued to work, 180 features and almost 90 roles on television, because he was capable and hard working. He played bit parts and featured roles, because, once he was out of the Poverty Row B movies, he never got between the camera and the people it loved, the stars.

We remember the stars and think about the smaller ones who fell and continued to work, like Buster Keaton, Chester Morris, and Toomey, as failures because of the inexplicable workings of the cinematic world: destroyed by jealous or incompetent executives. In truth, Toomey was a success. He had a long career, he worked a lot, he had two children with his wife of 56 years, and died at 93. What he lacked was that mysterious combination of a camera that loved him, and the luck to find the role that everyone adored. Would he have been any happier as someone with a big contract with one of the majors? Like Mithridates, he died old.