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Wow! Such a good movie.

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

if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

A story about a gang of men who work atop high-power lines in southern California. Very dangerous stuff. But they're all good-natured and ready to go at any moment. If an old friend is accidentally electrocuted, his friends stand around for a second or two before the fade, and one of them remarks, "Boy, he's really cooked." Poor Edward G. Robinson. He's one of the gang and on their nights off, when they're dancing and boozing it up, he just can't seem to make it with the oh-so-available girls, the kind who order champagne cocktails made of ginger ale. The men and his dancing partners blame it on Robinson's clumsiness but I think it's his short stature and his features, which resemble layers of flab piled horizontally on one another. Robinson himself is puzzled but optimistic. "Say, that brunette will be waiting for me next time." He's not too bright.It's in this clip joint that he meets Marlene Dietrich. He begs her to marry him, against the advice of his best friend, George Raft, and in an excess of compassion mixed with desperation she accepts. "That dame will be nothing but trouble," Raft advises.Well, he's right, and the story gets a little complicated, what with Dietrich falling for Raft, and those climbs up to the topgallants of those electrical towers.It's a routine movie but I'm giving it a medal for being representative of a particular, ill-defined genre -- the Warner Brothers working-class romantic drama of the 1930s. I don't know how many times the same story was recycled with changing locations, occupations, and characters. The story might be about tuna fishermen, truck drivers, or factory stiffs. Often, as here, the principal character marries a woman who falls for one of the other men. I recall Ida Lupino going mad on the witness stand in one of them. Someone once went to the trouble of tracking down all the permutations of the plot. The number approached a dozen.The cast was always familiar. Need we list them? This one has Robinson, Ward Bond, Frank McHugh with his high laugh, Alan Hale as Jumbo, and other familiar faces whose names I don't want to bother looking up. When Barton MacLane is in the movie, he's always the villain. The director was the business-like, no-nonsense Irishman Raoul Walsh but just as often it was the zippy English-mangling Hungarian Michael Curtiz. In need of some riderless ponies, he once shouted, "Bring on the empty horses!" Robinson the actor had more range than he's often given credit for. "Mnyah," from "Little Caesar," and that attitude of arrant vulgarity stuck with him for a decade. In the 40s he was given a chance to stretch his acting chops and did just fine in movies like "The Stranger" (not Camus) and "Woman in the Window," where he was a professor of psychology.Marlene Dietrich is the blond with a shady past, a babe than whom no femme is more fatale. She's just released from prison, bitter and cynical, but acquires something resembling integrity under the tutelage of the remarkably dull Robinson character. Yes, he's ugly, but he's not afraid of revealing his nature.He'll do it at the drop of a hat, just like the other guys. They all play the kind of grabass you expect in the boy's locker room of a high school gym. "Say, you're askin' for a knuckle sandwich." They unashamedly say "ain't" and use double negative with abandon. Sometimes the same gags crop up from picture to picture. McHugh: "I wish I was home with a book and a blond." Hale: "But you don't read." McHugh: "Who said anything about reading?" Reprised line for line two years later in Warner's "Action in the North Atlantic." Never a dull moment.

Is the movie a comedy with melodramatic overtones or a melodrama with comedic overtones. Sometimes it's hard to tell since exaggeration appears the way director Walsh has decided to pitch the material. The storms, the comedic byplay, Robinson's good-hearted working man—all are spread on pretty thickly and much of the time, I'm afraid, to a fault. At times there's almost a frenetic undercurrent as though the audience won't get the point unless it's shoveled on. Contrast Walsh's approach here with his tightly controlled direction of High Sierra (also 1941).All in all, it's a strange movie. For example, when I think "daughter of the American working class", I don't think of a 40-year old with a German accent, even if she does pop gum in one scene. Just how that queen of continental glamour Marlene Dietrich wound up in a Warner Bros. programmer is puzzling, to say the least, especially when the studio had that supremely soulful blue-collar girl, Ida Lupino, under contract. Too bad that the wooden Dietrich adds to the phoniness of a movie that already has too much.Of course, there are the thunder and lightning scenes that show what special effects in those days could do with a carefully lit soundstage. The storms are impressive, but they also make you doubt the sanity of anyone clambering around on 1,000 volt power lines. Falling appears to be the least of the hazards. Anyway, the movie's many conflicting parts produce an oddly awkward result, even if the very last shot achieves a kind of baroque poetry. Somehow, I suspect there's an inside story behind the making of this concoction that may be more compelling than the film itself.

Power-line repairman Edward G. Robinson marries prostitute Marlene Dietrich, but she finds herself enamored by hubby's best friend and colleague, a gallant George Raft.There is much to enjoy in Raoul Walsh's exhilarating melodrama, and although it adheres rather too strictly to a proved formula, Walsh, always a great master at this, gives depth and dimension to the action. Walsh paints a vivid and loyal picture of this blue-collar environment of camaraderie and pranks, and Alan Hale's repairman is the whole deal rolled into one, there is not ONE joke about high voltage that he doesn't know, or doesn't repeat, ad nauseam. Every workplace has one! 'Manpower' is full of the trademark Walsh dynamics, comparable to the electric power, the frequent thunderstorms and the high tempo. The action is engrossing, the film overall is smoothly produced, briskly edited, brilliantly lit, designed and photographed. Never did sleekly wet, black raincoats photograph more memorably.Robinson and Raft are congenially cast, but Dietrich is a long-shot as the prostitute turned housewife. "How's this dame stacked up?", Robinson asks of Raft, before he is introduced to her. Raft, waveringly: "Oh, just a dame ...". Well, she photographs like a goddess, and is impossibly glamorous. And quite improbably so.Don't expect another Walsh masterpiece, but brace yourself for a hugely enjoyable flic that just whirls by you.

With a great cast and director, in the golden age of movies, one can only gasp at the failings of this film. In the first place, the casting is terrible. One has to believe that little Eddie Robinson is a brawling blue collar guy and that George Raft is also a rough, tough electrical lineman. The writing is dreadful, especially the comic relief of Alan Hale. Every move of the film is predictable. And poor Marlene! Mostly, she just simmers and smokes cigarettes. A waste of time for all concerned, especially viewers.