The St. Louis Kid

I've long argued that Warner Bros. made the best B movies that I've seen, although I suppose you could argue that with the caliber of stars appearing in some of the B-length movies, they really ought to be thought of as programmers instead of B movies. An excellent example of this is The St. Louis Kid.

Cagney stars as Eddie Kennedy, a trucker at an interstate company based out of St. Louis. He and his best buddy Buck (Allen Jenkins) drive together, presumably so one can drive while the other sleeps, keeping the truck on the road longer. Buck has a way of getting into fisticuffs, but somehow it's always Eddie that winds up taking the rap for it, in the sense of needing to get bailed out of jail for it. Indeed, they nearly get into a fight when they block a car in the company parking lot, not realizing that car is owned by their new boss.

For their trouble, they're put on the St. Louis to Chicago run, this being the days before interstate highways; worse, they're forced to load the truck themselves. Eddie drives like a madman to get to Chicago more quickly, but he also has a tendency to stop suddenly, and one time in doing so, he gets rear-ended by a car driven by Ann Reid (Patricia Ellis). She lives in the small town of Ostopolis, a town that largely caters to the dairy farmers who live in the area. Ann gets Eddie brought to trial for causing the accident, but Eddie is clever enough to have read the local paper, and takes the side of the dairy farmers who comprise the jury in their fight against the local dairy collecting the milk to process it and sell it to the big cities, something that gets him the attention of Benson (Robert Barrat), one of the heads of the farmers.

Eddie said in court that he's even thinking of retiring to a life of farming, something you can't see James Cagney doing full time, but then this is a Hollywood movie. Of course doesn't get to live happily ever after on the farm at this point because we're maybe a third of the way through the picture. Instead, the bosses as the trucking company where Eddie works have gotten into a contract with the milk distributors to transport the milk that the farmers aren't getting a good enough price for. And Eddie and Buck are given that same route through Ostopolis that they had at the beginning of the movie!

When Eddie and Buck can't get the milk through, their bosses decide to use a little bit of muscle, bringing in what are essentially armed goons to bully the local farmers. And one of those goons eventually gets in a scrape with Benson, shooting Benson dead. Ann even drives up as it's happening, witnessing the crime, leading the goons to kidnap her and make it look for all the world as though Eddie is the guy who shot Benson.

To be honest, The St. Louis Kid is the sort of movie that shouldn't hold up if you look too closely at it and try to evaluate it the way you might evaluate a prestige movie. Indeed, one of the humorous errors is when Eddie breaks out of jail. The police description of him is "American", 24 years old (Cagney was a good decade older at the time), and five foot ten. Ain't nobody finding a fugitive Cagney if they're looking for someone 5'10". But it's the sort of movie that Cagney and the rest of the cast make worth watching through their sheer energy. For all the plot holes it has, The St. Louis Kid is just a heck of a lot of fun to watch anyway.