Man of Iron

Man of Iron (1935)

** (out of 4)

Chris Bennett (Barton MacLane) works the floor at a factory where everyone of the blue collar workers love him. He's eventually promoted to General Manager and then Vice President but he starts to lose focus of the real job when a dirty couple (John Eldredge, Mary Astor) start to fill his mind with the wrong stuff. Soon Bennett loses his friends and his job is at stake when the workers decide to go up against him. MAN OF IRON is mildly entertaining thanks in large part to MacLane's performance but there's still no question that its story is quite stupid and just continues to grow dumber from one scene to the next. There's no question that the biggest problem is the screenplay. It seems pretty clear that Warner was wanting another hard-hitting drama where the working men looked great while money was shown as being something evil. All sorts of Warner pictures handled this subject and most of them weren't as far-fetched as this one here. The biggest problem is that Bennett is such an idiot that he never catches on to even the smallest things and this really hurts the film and his character. You'd think he'd have at least a little common sense but in order for the story to move the screenwriters had to turn him into an idiot and in the end this just becomes annoying and keeps the film from being as powerful as it wants to be. MacLane is extremely good in his role and I thought he certainly kept the picture moving. Eldredge is also very good in the role of the snake and we get Astor who is pretty much wasted in a thankless role. MAN OF IRON clocks in at just 63-minutes so it moves fast enough but it just needed a bit more.