... since according to Robert Osborne's intro on TCM last night he asked that his name be removed from all advertising and intro credits. All pre-Zanuck Fox films have a rustic quality to them, the reason being that Fox catered to rural audiences and so their warnings of the sins of big city life and straying from the teachings of "the good book" were never subtle, and this movie is no exception. So if this one at first comes across like DeMille meets Indiana, cut it some slack.
Tracy plays con-man Jim Carter, who stokes coal to earn his way home where ultimately the only job he can get is being the target in a carnival game. He loses that job like he loses so many, and in the aftermath meets the reverend-like Pop McWade (Henry B. Walthall). Pop gives Jim a job and says "it is better to give than receive", but Jim has a point when he realizes you need to have something first if you want to give anything away. And that's a problem for Pop, because his low-key sermon like deliveries when advertising his carnival attraction themed after "Dante's Inferno" are not getting many takers. Thus Jim jazzes up the carnival barking and pop's revenues increase. Jim falls for Pop's daughter, Betty (Claire Trevor), and the two are married and have a son.
All is calm on the domestic front, but apparently Pop might as well be talking to himself when it comes to Jim's business morals. Jim ultimately builds an entertainment empire by driving people out of business, by threatening building inspectors and bribing them, and there is more than one suicide caused by his ruthless ways, yet he never repents - that is, until his high seas gambling ship catches fire with his small son aboard.
The one sin Jim never commits is disloyalty to either his wife or father in law. Pop is too good to be true in how he repeatedly forgives and patiently waits for Jim to have an epiphany, and his wife is just plain blind to the truth - for awhile anyways.
If Pop's talk of hell isn't enough to get the viewer's attention, there is actually what some call a "dream sequence" of hell in the middle of the film as Pop goes through Dante's Inferno and describes hell to Jim via a sequence that is supposedly from a silent film Fox had made ten years before. It's a long scene of innumerable people suffering in hell and, strangely enough since this was made after the production code took effect, there is quite a bit of nudity shown.
Watch this one for its odd plot, for some pretty good action scenes, its strange dance of the condemned in the "hell sequence" and for a 16 year old Rita Hayworth seventh billed in the ending credits as Rita Cansino in a spectacular Latin dance. She sets the screen on fire - almost literally. The one bad thing I could say was that there was no perceivable chemistry between Tracy and Claire Trevor. I like both performers, and normally Tracy sparkled with almost all of his leading ladies, but here it's like they're practically reading their lines to each other. I just don't feel it. It's one of the few times you'll actually catch Spencer Tracy acting - which is one thing he said an actor should never let the audience do.
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