Man of Iron (1935)

This script is pretty much paint by numbers - foreman Chris Bennett(Barton McLane) gets promoted from blue collar foreman to vice president, his head swells to the size of his salary, and his tastes in expensive things swell beyond the size of even that. Meanwhile, a slimy little weasel who thinks the vice-presidency should have been his plays Iago to McLane's Othello, giving him bad advice and deliberately causing miscommunication at every turn. Bennett doesn't make things any better by being distracted by building a huge estate for himself and thus not keeping his eye on the ball when it comes to work. Dorothy Peterson plays Bennett's loving, loyal, and level-headed wife Bessie, and Joseph Crehan plays the boss who gave Chris his big chance. Mary Astor is completely under-utilized and hardly figures into the plot at all.

This is a nice time passer, neither good nor bad and thus hard to review. It's one of the few films I've watched that is almost exactly a five out of ten - no more no less. It was probably made as a second feature which is something that became extinct after the proliferation of television, just as manufacturing plants operating in the United States such as the one described in this film have become virtually extinct. Watch it for the performances. Barton McLane is the biggest name in the film and he does a first rate job as always of playing tough bull-in-a-china-shop fellows such as this.