Don't Believe the Hype

I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

George O'Brien is a masked wrestler -- he thinks his father will be ashamed that he isn't using the family fortune to become an intellectual. Daddy Lloyd Ingraham thinks George is effete, so he sends him up to the logging camp to toughen him up. Along the way, there's pretty Beatrice Roberts to fight over with Ward Bond.Although this movie has a screwball comedy start, it quickly turns into a conventional romantic comedy with logging sequences and fights. O'Brien is good in his role, and he only gets to hit Ward Bond, and that only once -- he is a gentleman, after all. Still, it's competently directed by Dave Howard, and the script, while no world-beater, holds together well enough to make this a good, if unexceptional movie for O'Brien fans.

This film is available through Alpha Video. In many cases, and this is certainly one of them, their DVDs are of exceptionally poor quality prints--and this one looks like a copy of a copy of a copy of a videotape. It's ugly, that's for sure.The basic story idea of "Park Avenue Lodger" is good. However, one HUGE part of the story never is resolved--and it's a shame because it's a really interesting twist.The story begins with a wealthy father (Lloyd Ingraham) complaining to his friend that his son is a bit of a sissy. The young man (George O'Brien) is very cultured and well-educated, but the father doubts the guy has any ability to work a job that requires muscle and stamina. What the father does NOT know is that the son is quite the macho man--and is a masked professional wrestler!! However, since neither confides in the other, neither knows that they really have a lot in common. Oddly, after the father attempts to change the son by sending him west to work as a logger, there is no mention about the pro wrestling career!! I really wanted to hear more about this and it was clearly a dangling plot point.Once out west, two things happen. First, the son falls in love with a woman whose family are direct competitors with his family. Second, there are a bunch of thieves working in the logging industry and they will do anything to stop the boss' son from investigating. But, the guy is quite savvy and soon learns the truth--at which point his father shows absolutely no faith in him and will not accept that he's being cheated. How does it all work out? See the film.In addition to the dangling plot point, I must say that Ingraham plays one of the nastiest, least appreciative and surliest fathers I can recall having seen in a film. I really think they should have toned this down a bit. Overall, a mildly interesting film that simply should have been a lot better. It all seemed very rushed and would have loved it if the film had moved more logically and deliberately.

I doubt we'll ever see a director's cut of Park Avenue Logger, I saw a version that had some 17 minutes cut from it. Still I was able to fill in the gaps and we got the kind of B programmer that was released by RKO Pictures that probably was a second feature to a Katharine Hepburn or an Astaire/Rogers film.The title role is played by George O'Brien whose dad is worried about his son becoming a sissy. Even with the build on O'Brien who definitely was one of the best physical specimens in Hollywood, father is worried about that. Unbeknownst to dad O'Brien is a professional wrestler known as the Masked Marvel and the mask keeps him incognito.George stays incognito when dad decides to send him up to his Oregon lumber camp to learn the business that got dad his millions. While there he discovers a nasty scheme between his father's foreman Willard Robertson and a rival camp's foreman Ward Bond to bilk both his father and rival owner Beatrice Roberts of lots of money and in the case of Roberts her own land. George also falls big time for Roberts the logging queen of the Northwest.Bert Hanlon has a nice part as company cook and company agitator for Roberts. Park Avenue Logger is a nice routine action programmer that used a lot of stock logging footage blended nicely in with the players. Not as good as Warner Brothers Valley Of The Giants, but they had a much bigger budget to work with. Might have been better had I seen the whole film rather than a butchered version.

Every once in a while I come across a title that no one else has reviewed here on the IMDb. Not surprising, as there are an untold number of pictures that haven't seen the light of day until compiled in some of those mega box sets you find in a place like Sam's Club. It's the only way I would have ever come across something like "Park Avenue Logger", a 1937 programmer that combines some offbeat elements and manages to tell a generally coherent story that doesn't seem too implausible.George O'Brien portrays an intellectual college graduate who his father considers to be a softie, with no bad habits and a penchant for intellectual conversation. I actually got a kick out of that exchange between Grant (O'Brien) and his father's psychologist friend early on, about the 'racial characteristics of the penguin'. Here I thought that the study of nonsense like that was a more modern phenomenon, but now I know better.It's never really explained or explored why Grant would have taken up professional wrestling as the Masked Marvel, but for 1937, that was a pretty well staged match he had there with the Russian Lion. Primarily to let the viewer know up front that Grant was no lightweight, it was more than evident when he showed up at the Timberlake Camp, sporting a barrel chest and sizable forearms. It was one of those plot points that wasn't thought out too well ahead of time, as if the elder Curran might never have seen his own son in a physical contest or sporting event.Once at the camp, Grant finds himself involved in some intrigue dealing with a rival logging group, and the pretty young woman (Beatrice Roberts) who runs the operation with her father. The senior Curran's business manager is running a couple sets of books not only to steal from Curran, but to buy out the O'Shea's in one of those classic Western mortgage swindles. It doesn't work of course, as Grant turns the tables on the bad guys and wins over the romantic interest as well.I'm always amazed by the things I learn in researching these flicks on the IMDb. Ward Bond had a prominent role in this picture and I recall him as a favorite when I was a kid watching 'Wagon Train'. Figuring that this was one of his early screen roles, I was startled to find that by the time he showed up in this one, he had already appeared in over a hundred pictures!