Iron Man (1931)

User Rating:

6.6/10   

Director:

Tod Browning

Writers:

W.R. Burnett (story)
Francis Edward Faragoh (screenplay)

Release Date:

30 April 1931 (USA)

Genre:

Drama

Plot:

Prizefighter Mason loses his opening fight so wife Rose leaves him for Hollywood. Without her around Mason trains and starts winning...

Plot Keywords:

Nipples Visible Through Clothing | Boxing | Beautiful Woman | Based On Novel

Cast

Lew Ayres	...	Kid Mason
Robert Armstrong	...	George Regan
Jean Harlow	...	Rose Mason
John Miljan	...	Paul H. Lewis
Edward Dillon	...	Jeff
Mike Donlin	...	McNeil
Morrie Cohan	...	Rattler O'Keefe
Mary Doran	...	Showgirl
Mildred Van Dorn	...	Gladys DeVere
Ned Sparks	...	Riley
Sammy Blum	...	Mandel

Runtime:

73 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

1.20 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono (Western Electric Sound System)

Company:

Universal Pictures

Movie Connections:

Featured in Harlow: The Blonde Bombshell (1993) (TV)

No Cinderella

When you enter into a film, you are accepting a world. You are accepting whatever God and physics and mythology that the filmmaker has created. Within that world, wheels turn and things happen.

All too often we think the movie is about those happenings. We focus on characters and the emotions they convey. But the deeper influence of a film is in how the world works.

Over time, movie watchers develop a sensitivity to this and make choices about which worlds resonate or not.

I have decided to boycott Glazier/Howard films because they are convinced that we like a world where some bad things happen as if they were rainstorms, but the entire cosmos is infused with a happy sweetness.

If you watch film deeply, this can ruin your whole day, with great expenditures of psychic energy in buying back your individuality. So instead of seeing "Cinderella Man" which is in the theaters now, I sought another boxing movie instead.

Sure, we have "Raging Bull" which is an exercise in visualizing a brutal personality. And we have "Rocky" which is sort of cold war ode to nationalism. But I chose this because it is by a director whose world I respect.

Tod Browning's world is a complex one, not catagorizable in terms of a single type of God or fate, depending on how you think. He himself comes from a circus world with some elements of risk, some of heavy fate, and others of practiced comedy tied to honor.

I credit Browning with laying the groundwork that allowed noir to take hold in the 30s, probably the strongest influence in film. So this film is about a contender, several actually. And it IS a contender, but unlike Howard's cardboard guy, this fellow has a wife that destroys the first layer of his world in order to expose and reinforce the larger world.

In the story, that's the world of honor and striving and self assurance. In the world of film, it is the world of self awareness and the link of fate to the game.

Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.