King of Hockey

For those of you who are ice hockey fans, the Stanley Cup finals are coming up soon. With that in mind, I watched the movie King of Hockey.

The Violets are the champions of one of the minor leagues, since Warner Bros. couldn't use the NHL and the league didn't have much popularity outside of Canada anyway. So the Violets are barnstorming in the offseason to make money, taking their talents to one of the colleges that is rather a surprise to have a hockey team at all since Warner Bros. probably filmed a building in Los Angeles, if not something on the backlot, that looks like it has the sort of tree not suitable for a school with long winters.

Anyhow, the star of the college hockey team is Gabby Dugan (Dick Purcell), playing in what he thinks is his final game since he's planning to hang up his skates after college and make the real money selling bonds, something that very obviously dates this movie if you couldn't figure that out already. It being the mid-1930s and there still being a Depression on, lots of 20-something men thought they too could sell bonds, so Gabby isn't able to get him a good job. That makes him go crawling back to Trotter (Joseph Crehan), coach of Violets, looking for that job that Trotter had suggested was open.

Gabby rooms with Jumbo (Wayne Morris), and on their day off from the team, they decide to go to a commercial ice rink, because Jumbo knows that's where a hockey player meets the classy women. Jumbo meets young Peggy "Princess" O'Rourke, there taking skating lessons and escorted by her adult sister Kathleen (Anne Nagel). Gabby meets Kathleen and for him it's love at first sight, although for her it's just a nice day out and fun to meet a hockey player, but that's the end of it. At least until Peggy suggests the family go see a hockey game since none of them have ever done so before.

Meanwhile, professional gambler Nick Torga (George Stone) has been betting on hockey, and losing by betting against Gabby. He gets the brilliant idea to have Gabby, if not throw games, at least do the hockey equivalent of basketball point-shaving and take penalties that will keep him off the ice. Gabby sees Kathleen sitting behind the penalty box, so he decides he will in fact take an inordinate number of penalties so he can hit on her, not because of anything Nick wanted. But Nick sees the penalties and expects Gabby to keep doing Nick's business.

Jumbo is no dummy, and since he knows Gabby talked to Torga, he thinks Gabby is on the take too. Jumbo is ticked, and gets in a fight with Gabby that concusses Gabby and affects his eyesight. This combined with the dalliances with a professional gambler get Gabby kicked off the team, after which he goes blind. Except that it's one of those forms of movie blindness that can be totally cured, if only the victim gets "an operation".

King of Hockey is one of those ultra-B movies under an hour long. So there's not much of a story here, at least not much original. And not exactly a stellar cast, either. It's all fairly dumb stuff, but at the same time a fairly good example of the genre of movies even more B than the studio stuff that ran in the 60-70 minute range. And at least Wayne Morris got to go on to supporting roles in A movies.