Man of the People

A lot of character actors put up some very good peformances over the course of their Hollywood careers, but didn't necessarily get much chance to be a star of anything above a B movie. Maltese-born Joseph Calleia is one such example. TCM aired some of his movies several months back, including a starring role in an MGM B picture, Man of the People.

Calleia plays Jack Moreno, who grew up in the Little Italy of a big city and was, one can guess, the sort of kid the community had high hopes for and helped get him through law school as a result. The movie opens with Moreno recently having passed his bar exam and getting the framed certificate to hang on his wall as he's about to start a law practice in Little Italy, not that the people can afford the services of a good lawyer. But they're continuing to repay him by having a party and giving him a law library to get him on his way. Crashing the party, literally, is Abbey Reid (Florence Rice), whose car nearly injures a local kid. Moreno invites her up to the party, and you can guess that Moreno likes Abbey, although there's a severe clss difference between the two.

Their paths won't cross again for a while, however. This being a movie from the late 1930s, one of the themes is big-city corruption, with ward-heelers being able to deliver a block of votes from an entire neighborhood. The part of town where Moreno and his fellow Italian-Americans live is run, if you will, by William Grady (Thomas Mitchell). Grady realizes that Moreno can be of use to the "organization", but is also smart enough to know that Moreno could theoretically be a threat since he knows a lot about the local community and they trust Moreno more than they do the organization. Grady sends an emissary to try to get Moreno to fall in with the organization, but Moreno wants to be his own man. In response, Grady rigs cases to make certain Moreno loses all his cases.

So Moreno finally gives in and starts working for Grady, which is eventually going to bring him back into contact with Abbey. That involves Abbey not quite so directly, but in connection with the people in her class. She's got a man pursing her, Edward Spetner (Edward Nugent), whose father Carter (Jonathan Hale), has purportedly come up with a new advance in mining. This advance is a machine that can supposedly find gold so that its user will know where to mine before drilling even an inch. It's something that sounds like an absolute scam, and of course it is. But the con men are slick enough to get a bunch of people to invest, with Abbey's own mother winding up on the board having no idea the company is a scam.

Moreno gets involved here because he's gotten tired of the corruption. Grady was going to push him to become DA, where the corruption would make Grady even more powerful, but Moreno has decided to push back, leading Grady to back another candidate and use vote fraud to win. But Moreno's integrity has brought him to the attention of the governor, who is planning to run an anti-corruption commission. Moreno would be perfect for that, but one of the cases is going to be securities fraud, and the company that Abbey and her friends are involved with....

Joseph Calleia gives a pretty good performance here, and Thomas Mitchell is unsurprisingly good as well. But Man of the People never rises above B status, largely because the script is so dopey. The scam is such nonsense, and yet all the "bright" people fall for it. And the way Moreno breaks the climactic case wide open is so obvious you wonder why nobody else thought of it for as long as the case goes on.

Man of the People is a good example of the sort of product the studios needed to keep churning out to fill theaters with new material in pre-TV days, but it's not a particularly great or memorable movie.