Corsair

After being told that he hasn't the right stuff for making it on Wall Street, former All American Football player Chester Morris goes in for a different kind of piracy. He decides to become a real pirate and beat the man who told him he was no good on the street Emmet Corrigan at his own game.

Which in addition to Wall Street stock manipulations is bootlegging. Corrigan's role is eerily like that of Joseph P. Kennedy. Only this Wall Street pirate and bootlegger has a daughter played by Thelma Todd a rather spoiled young lady used to getting exactly what she wants.

Todd's the main problem, she gives a spiritless and perfunctory performance, so atypical of her. She has absolutely no chemistry. As for Morris he gets a bit too self righteous.

On the plus side when the hijacking of bootleggers like Fred Kohler gets going Corsair gets a bit of life pumped into it. Frank McHugh plays a part he would repeat over and over at Warner Brothers as the hero's best friend and sets the mold here. Kohler is one nasty customer as the bootlegger Morris robs.

Corsair is an interesting, but in some stages rather lifeless film.

I wasn't expecting much from this film. I watched it mainly because it stars two favorites of mine - Chester Morris and Thelma Todd. I was very pleasantly surprised. The film opens with John Hawks (Chester Morris), a collegiate football star, winning the big game. Later that night, at a society party, he meets Alison Corning (Thelma Todd) who personifies every argument in favor of the inheritance tax you've ever heard with the saying "spare the rod spoil the child" thrown in for good measure. She's beautiful, spoiled, used to getting whatever and whoever she wishes, and will do anything for a thrill. John's bad luck is that she wants him from first sight. She convinces her big Wall Street financier dad, "Steve" as she calls him, to give John a job at his firm. John is hardly enamored by Alison. He can see right through her, and on the surface that's got to be a pleasant experience for any guy, but then you get to the not-so-gooey middle. This is what repels him.

So John takes the job, not really knowing what to do after college anyways, but soon he sees that Alison is the apple that has not fallen far from the tree. Dad is all about making money and he doesn't care if he has to scam orphans and widows to do it. When John refuses to hard sell some worthless stock to an old lady in exchange for her solidly performing bonds he's tossed out without a second glance by dear old Steve.

John then decides to take to piracy on the high seas - after all it's not too different from what Alison's dad is doing - except he will steal from crooks not orphans and widows. John sets his sights on one bootlegger in particular, and with the help of a wealthy friend who backs him financially by helping him buy a boat (Frank McHugh as Chub), he starts to regularly hijack gangster "Big John's" haul of bootleg liquor and sell it to Steve, his old employer, who is into bootlegging himself as a sideline.

Now the problem here is that John doesn't spread the pain around to various bootleggers - he picks strictly on Big John's boats. He should realize that Big John did not get where he got by dropping out of Sunday school and sooner or later he is going to retaliate. I'll let you watch and see how this all shakes out.

I just thought it was very clever and timely for a filmmaker to equate the robber barons of Wall Street with piracy on the high seas. In fact, it makes pirates look noble compared to the Wall Street banksters. There's also some gritty reality thrown in via Mayo Methot's Sophie, the typist for Big John who's beautiful but beaten down by life in the Depression and the constant companionship of ruffians just trying to make a living. Her relationship with Ned Sparks' "Slim" is touching. Slim is one of Big John's men, and the couple is helping out John Hawks in his acts of piracy against Big John in return for a percentage, hoping to get out of "the life" once and for all. The ever present danger of getting caught - if they are lucky, by the law, if not so lucky, by Big John, makes them underplay their emotions for one another and their emotional caution turns out to be quite touching.

If you like Chester Morris or Thelma Todd, if you want to see a different kind of gangster film, if you think that many of the people running Goldman Sachs and AIG deserve to be cell mates with Bernie Madoff but will probably never learn their lesson from anybody or anything in this life, give this almost forgotten little film a chance.

For Todd fans the first part showcases her lively appeal. Here, she's cast as a pampered debutante used to getting her own way. Then she meets football hero Morris who's self-disciplined down to his toes, and surprisingly rejects her romantic overtures. Unfortunately, Todd's stellar role soon recedes as the murky storyline with Morris's hijacking scheme takes over. Too bad for Todd fans.

The film's pre-Code 1931, but here there's surprisingly little innuendo to reflect those pre-censorship years. Still, there remains the lingering drama of Prohibition, and that's what the plot turns on, as Morris is out to prove that he's as effective at becoming rich as Todd's ruthless Wall Street father, Steve. The rivalry's set up when Morris refuses, as an employee in Steve's brokerage, to bilk an unfortunate old lady at Steve's command. Morris's heated exchange with his boss amounts to a telling snapshot of a time when stock markets were crashing and Wall Street needed money no matter how ruthlessly gotten. Thus football hero Morris shows his principled core despite the desperate tenor of the times. But how will he prove that his ethical approach to riches is as effective as Steve's unprincipled methods like bilking an old lady.

Here the story turns a couple of twists, as arrogant Steve bootlegs for needed money by running an offshore smuggling operation, while the ethical Morris surprisingly hijacks that operation with his gunboat, the Corsair. So it looks like the steely Morris has turned to a form of crime in order to compete with rival, Steve. So what's going on with the film's apparent hero. Has he lost his sense of right and wrong by becoming a hijacker even if it is for illegal booze.

Anyway, that's the nub of a good plot. Trouble is that on screen it plays out in fuzzy, dispersed fashion that fails to generate much suspense or involvement. In short, the story's potential is squandered along with actress Todd. Nor does it help that Kohler, the chubby gang boss Big John, mugs-it-up to a clownish distractive degree . All in all, the flick's no tribute to ace director West or to those who fleshed out the screenplay. Still, there are memories of the incandescent Todd shortly before her tragic death. Too bad she didn't get the screen time here that she so richly deserved.

Ex-football player Chester Morris, egged on by rich girl Thelma Todd, tries bootlegging and piracy as a career. Will he continue to triumph over the villainous gangsters whose cargoes he hijacks, with friends Ned Sparks and Frank McHugh, or will Big John get his revenge on the crew of the CORSAIR?

This isn't a great work of art, and no new ground is broken. But once the plot gets rolling (it takes about a reel), this is a darn good action flick with a nice straightforward leading-man performance out of Morris, a surprisingly sympathetic turn out of Ned Sparks, and much of the fluid, frequently beautiful camera work and staging that is characteristic of director Roland West. Mayo Methot probably gets the best acting scene, and, in this case, is helped by her director, who has the sense to let the scene play out with simple lighting and staging. The director, indeed, helps himself by downplaying some of the camera showiness on films like Alibi and The Bat, and by improving, significantly, his direction of actors and his pacing of the story.

We do not have a perfect film here. Thelma Todd is around to look pretty, but she had not found her dramatic acting chops at the time this movie was shot. Also, the ending of the movie is utterly wrong and too drawn out. But in its middle reels, this movie is as spry and well-paced as a typical Warners movie, and suggests that Morris could have had a much better movie career with more films like this. Worth seeing -- particularly if you think 1931 movies are all people standing around and declaiming while the camera stays put.

Aside from a rather silly underlying premiss, this makes for quite an entraining little thriller. Handsome, but wooden, Chester Morris is "John", a football-star graduate who arrives on Wall St. With a bit of a conscience. That isn't what his unscrupulous boss "Corning" (Emmett Corrigan), nor his rather grasping daughter want. Rather than compromise his sense of decency, he decides to beat them at their own game by diverting illicit liquor being smuggled into the country. Errol Flynn, he isn't - and the backdrop photography is poor, but the story moves along quite well with half decent efforts from Thelma Todd as the daughter ("Alison") and from Fred Kohler as the kingpin "Big John". The story is nicely circular, what goes around comes around - little jeopardy but some fun escapades and the opportunity for us to sit back and enjoy it's simplicity. Not a film anyone will remember, but an adequate way to kill 75 minutes.