This early Warners social-consciousness riff raises several serious and still-timely issues: racketeering, price-fixing, corruption. And it has a great leading man in Walter Huston, here a racketeer who tries to reform to please his long-unseen daughter, Loretta Young, and become respectable enough to allow her marriage to nice, prestigious-but-broke David Manners, who plays, get this, one Dick Cheney. There's a gallery of interesting characters--Willard Robertson as a revenge-seeking businessman wronged by Huston's trust, Dudley Digges as Huston's utterly humorless second-in-command, Doris Kenyon as a socialite who's against all Huston's principles yet persuasively befriends him. This, and some other hard-to-believe plot twists, are pulled off pretty well, and Huston's as superb as usual. But it all builds to a tense climax that simply can't resolve itself satisfactorily. We want Young and Manners to end up together, and we want Huston to end happily. There's no way for both to happen, and the final image, that of a grocer lowering his prices again now that the racket's been busted, is supposed to suffice as a happy ending. Too much has preceded it, and we're left feeling unsatisfied. Still worth watching, certainly, as evidence of Warners' interest in tackling tough issues in its early talkies, and for Huston's expertise and Young's loveliness (she's good here, too). But I still felt cheated.
Review of The Ruling Voice
