Claw To Depression's Top

Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. Wants Success At Any Price (1934)

Released just ahead of strengthened PCA enforcement, Success At Any Price took aim at shifty business practice, and thanks to writer and committed communist John Howard Lawson, delivered its haymaker to far greater effect than later films where Lawson and other Hollywood Reds could but salt scripts lightly with political content. Success was based on a play of Lawson's that was well received, denuded of Anti-Semite theme, but otherwise laying timber to amoral Wall Streeters. Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. starts off a rotter and pretty much ends that way; the picture doesn't pull punches like you'd expect even of pre-coding where romantic leads are involved. Finality of Fairbanks with darkened and hollow eyes must have given pause to those who came, but this being RKO in doldrums, fewer did (a mere $150K in domestic rentals). Much of what this studio generated was like Warner programmers with life sucked out of them, Success having no music, other than source, and playing dead serious all the way. Much of that was Lawson getting in his licks; a print of Success At Any Price was what HUAC members needed when he and other Unfriendly Tenners took the stand during postwar investigations. Still, there is good writing and dialogue here, Lawson full bore at bead on system soured. Frank Morgan's remark at one point that he still believes in America comes across as hopeless naïveté, if not outright idiocy. Such a line, and indeed much of Price's points, would have been expunged had the picture been submitted later in 1934. Ancillary victim is Colleen Moore, fourth-billed and a doormat for all of 75 minutes Success lasts. It's tough reconciling her character here with the Flaming Youth of ten years back. No comeback could come of casting like this, but wasn't that case in the previous season's The Power and The Glory, where she played a same sort of drab part? Success At Any Price turns up on TCM and should eventually on Warner Archive as well, though elements will need a scrubbing for DVD release.