Excellent, a Must See

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

This early Warners social-consciousness riff raises several serious and still-timely issues: racketeering, price-fixing, corruption. And it has a great leading man in Walter Huston, here a racketeer who tries to reform to please his long-unseen daughter, Loretta Young, and become respectable enough to allow her marriage to nice, prestigious-but-broke David Manners, who plays, get this, one Dick Cheney. There's a gallery of interesting characters--Willard Robertson as a revenge-seeking businessman wronged by Huston's trust, Dudley Digges as Huston's utterly humorless second-in-command, Doris Kenyon as a socialite who's against all Huston's principles yet persuasively befriends him. This, and some other hard-to-believe plot twists, are pulled off pretty well, and Huston's as superb as usual. But it all builds to a tense climax that simply can't resolve itself satisfactorily. We want Young and Manners to end up together, and we want Huston to end happily. There's no way for both to happen, and the final image, that of a grocer lowering his prices again now that the racket's been busted, is supposed to suffice as a happy ending. Too much has preceded it, and we're left feeling unsatisfied. Still worth watching, certainly, as evidence of Warners' interest in tackling tough issues in its early talkies, and for Huston's expertise and Young's loveliness (she's good here, too). But I still felt cheated.

Ruling Voice, The (1931) ** (out of 4) Disappointing crime-drama from Warner has Walter Huston playing a racketeer who will stop at nothing to get as much power and money that he can. The daughter (Loretta Young) he hasn't seen in ten years comes home from Europe with a fiancé (David Manners) but when she learns what her father is really doing she turns her back on him. I'm a major fan of the three leads but sadly this melodrama is way too wordy and in the end it's a pretty boring film from start to finish. The biggest problem is the actual screenplay that doesn't offer very much except for tired dialogue that seems to keep coming and coming. Even the easiest of scenes contain way too much dialogue and the talking just keeps going to the point where you're ready to turn your hearing off just to get away from it. The screenplay is full of predictable things and not for a second will anyone believe the relationship between Huston and Young. There wasn't a single second where I actually believed that he would care about what she feels towards him. I mean, he hasn't bothered seeing her in ten years and all of the sudden he's just going to change his ways? Huston is decent in the role of the racketeer but no one is going to confuse this for one of his better performances. He does seem to be somewhat all over the place in terms of staggering away the set but I'm going to guess this has more to do with the director. Young is as beautiful as ever as this here was certainly a very high point in terms of those beautiful looks. Her performance hits all the right notes and she's wonderful in the sequence where she learns the truth about her father. Manners will always be best remembered for his role in the same year's Dracula but the more I see from him the more impressed I get. He perfectly fits the role of this nice guy trying to make money to marry Young. The film runs a rather short 72-minutes but you'd swear it was twice as long due to the non-stop talk and lack of any real action. Fans of the three leads might want to check it out if they plan to see everything they've done but others should stay clear.

As he is in "Night Court," Walter Huston is superb in this harsh early mob story. Some might think his change of heart over daughter Loretta Young sentimental but not I. It is psychologically plausible and doesn't sell out the rough nature of the story. Not much ends happily, though the path for Young and David Manners -- a highly improbable couple -- does clear.Huston is probably best known for "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre." To me, he is first and foremost the fine American businessman in the lovely "Dodsworth." He was very convincing in these earlier unsympathetic roles, though. This movie pulls no punches and has some scary scenes. It doesn't seem at all dated. It could have been made 70 years later -- but teenagers wouldn't be interested so it wouldn't have been.

A potentially interesting entry in Warner Brothers' series of crime dramas is weakened by an improbably wordy script, stagey performances -- Walter Huston, in this early role, seems to have no sense of where the camera is -- and an outright awful performance by Doris Kenyon, who, although fifth-billed, is actually the female lead.Despite the ethnic types that inhabit the better Warners crime dramas, the Irishmen and Italians, this one seems to be inhabited solely by WASPS who wear impeccable, old fashioned clothing.On the plus side, Loretta Young is in her luminously beautiful phase, an absolute pleasure to look at, although she isn't given much to do. David Manners is adequate as the juvenile lead and the idea of the story, how honest men can be driven to become criminals, is potentially interesting. But this movie doesn't live up to its potential.