Bad Guy (1937) User Reviews (7)

Not a Bad Movie

[boblipton · 5/10 · 10 January 2019]

Bruce Cabot winds up in prison, gets paroled, plays rough as a line man in this MGM programmer.

The direction by Edward Cahn is mostly adequate visually, but weak in terms of line reading -- Virginia Grey, as the girl Cabot and his brother, Edward Norris both want is poor, seemingly more interested in her enunciation than her feelings. It also appears that the human side of the story was so short that they had to cut in half a reel or more of Norris attending a lecture on high voltage, so the audience can be fascinated by images of electricity ladders. Because I saw such things in grade school, I wasn't.

There's a potentially interesting character study of a guy who actually doesn't feel any fear, but the powers-that-be were either incapable of or unwilling to offer such a story. Instead it turns into a straight melodrama, diverting for an hour, but not much more.

all about electricty. and a crook gets in and out of prison.

[ksf-2 · 6/10 · 11 January 2019]

Very seldom shown "Bad Guy".... has only 56 votes on imdb so far. Bruce Cabot and Ed Norris are Lucky and Steve, electric linemen. Right from the start, Lucky is complaining about what life has handed him, and how he's ready to take whatever he can from life. When a card game setup goes wrong, Lucky ends up in the slammer, on death row. A couple miracles happen, and before you know it, he's bounced for heroic actions. Before he goes, he has a discussion with the warden about destiny... is everything pre-planned or do we make our own path? Pretty deep for a con-man. But... getting a job after prison isn't easy. Lucky could fall back into his old ways, in spite of getting a second chance. Also in here is Virginia Grey; she had started in films as a ten year old. and was in the awesome film The Women at 22 ! and vaudeville entertainer Cliff Edwards is in here as Hi-Line, fellow electrician. Try to find him playing the ukulele in one of his films -- it's great! This film has pretty good acting and a pretty good story. it's also a documentary on how electricity works and how dangerous it can be; they keep giving safety tips, like don't use wire to fly your kite. (did kids really do that??) always wear your gloves and your climbing strap. stay away from live wires. They spend a LOT of time talking about the high voltage electricity, but it does play a large part of the story. Picture quality is pretty rough... the the picture flashes repeatedly through the film. It's really noticed in the first half, but not so much in the second half. Directed by Ed Cahn... made a bunch of B horror films. It's not bad.

Bad guy, strange movie

[marcslope · 6/10 · 11 January 2019]

An MGM melodrama-romance-documentary B, this one packs a little of everything into its 70 minutes or so. The bad guy of the title is Bruce Cabot, a lineman who gets mixed up in a gambling-related murder, is sentenced to the chair, gets out of it, and returns to his unofficial brother (Edward Norris, who's OK), upon which they both romance Virginia Grey. Cabot, who always had an easy machismo and is very well photographed here, adds some needed ambiguity: Is he really a bad guy? A good guy gone wrong? Just a good guy? Turns out he's a bad guy, so you're meant to be happy at his final fate, but it's hard to. The story's slim, so Edward Cahn pads it out with way too much footage of electrical linemen, including Norris and Cliff Edwards attending an electrical seminar/demonstration. A so-so B all in all, but there's real chemistry between Grey and Cabot (if not Grey and Norris), and a couple of good speeches--one by Cabot romancing Grey, one by Norris sussing out his complicated feelings about Cabot--lift it a bit above the ordinary.

bad guy lead

[SnoopyStyle · 6/10 · 11 July 2022]

Electrical lineman John 'Lucky' Walden (Bruce Cabot) confronts the crooked gambler who stole his money and ends up killing him. He is sentenced to be executed.

It's interesting that Lucky is not innocent at all. I don't know that much about Cabot. He seems to be a veteran character actor who performed mostly next to the spotlight. He's more the thug side character. He's not really leading anyways. I guess that this could be called noir or a crime film. I would have preferred embracing the dark side a lot more and a bit less electricity. The electrical arcs are fun. It's a somewhat bland criminal character study. I'm not drawn to this character but it's still a little interesting.

MGM expamds a crime don't pay short into feature length.

[mark.waltz · 4/10 · 14 April 2020]

While this B movie isn't necessarily a bad film, it's pretty generic in terms of both crime dramas and the type of elegant films that MGM was turning out at the time. Warner Brothers was much better at making films like this, and that's not surprising with contract players like Eddie Robinson, Cagney and Bogart. A few years ago, MGM could make these type of films with Gable, Tracy or Montgomery, but by the late thirties, they were Superstars and certainly not going to star in a programmer of this nature. so we get Bruce Cabot and Edward Norris, capable actorscertainly, but definitely not megastar quality.

They are brothers who are electricity workers for the city, and after a card game leads to violence, Cabot ends up in prison. by some miracle, he is released, and his struggle to re-enter society leads him to realize the truth about his brother, Norris. The love intetests are a pair of sisters, Virginia Grey and Jean Chatburn, andone of them is going to end up terribly hurt in the outcome of her relationship. Comic relief is provided by Ukulele Ike (Cliff Edwards) who is called upon to give a demonstration of why children shouldn't play with electricity. the action sequences are decent and the film is short enough to be a possible time filler, but it's rather ordinary with nothing much to make it memorable.

Bruce Cabot plays the title character....what a surprise!

[planktonrules · 5/10 · 26 June 2022]

"Bad Guy" is a morality tale indicating that no matter what, evil will be punished...something that seems amazingly unlikely.

When the story begins, Lucky (Bruce Cabot) realizes he's been cheated by some professional gamblers. Instead of going to the police or seeing this as an expensive lesson, he confronts the gamblers and kills one of them! Not surprisingly, he's sentenced to death in the electric chair. But while in prison, Lucky does well...and manages to obtain a commutation and then parole! And, this and Lucky's comeuppance are all related to electricity. How all this plays out you should see for yourself.

This is a decent albeit slightly moralistic B-movie from Warner Brothers. Cabot plays the usual sort of jerk he played in films and because it's a morality tale, you know he'll get his in the end. Worth seeing and well acted but a bit predictable.

Good Bad Guy

[telegonus · 8/10 · 26 August 2002]

The movies loved rogues in the old days. Whores with hearts of gold (though they couldn't call them that,--whores I mean), con men who were kind to widows and orphans, gangsters who were really robin hoods in fedoras and pin-striped suits. This was especially true in the economic hard times of the Depression. One saw fewer of such films after the war. Nowadays things are quite different, and the formula would seem ridiculously old-fashioned and corny. Maybe the rise of mass education had something to do with it. As people have become more middle class they are increasingly concerned about "respectability". In the days when most people worked with their hands or lived off the land the good bad guy thing was acceptable. But enough sociological musing. In this film the good bad guy is Bruce Cabot, who could play really bad guys quite well also, which gives his character added ambiguity. The setting is New York, the work is power lineman. Cabot is credible in both his good and bad aspects, which makes his nice guy attributes more effective than had his role been played by, say, Don Ameche. Director Eddie Cahn, a master of the short subject, directs this one for speed and beauty. It has plenty of both. The backlot cityscapes are something to see.