Another biggish movie

Gordon MacRae was honored in Summer Under the Stars last August. He's best known for his musicals, although at the start of his career he wasn't yet cast in muscials. TCM ran MacRae's movie, The Big Punch, as part of MacRae's day.

MacRae is technically not the star here, although he's got as big a role as the official lead, Wayne Morris. Morris plays Chris Thorgenson, a college football star who is planning to go into the ministry (one of those mainline Protestant denominations where you can have a wife, so it's OK for him to have a love interest at the end of the movie) after finishing college. However, boxing promoter Con Festig knows Chris was a college boxing champ too, and offers Chris $50K to take up pro boxing. Chris says no, in a scene that provides just enough ministry to intrigue another boxer, Johnny Grant (that's MacRae).

Johnny thinks he could be a good boxer, but Con has other plans. Even though Con is managing Johnny, he decides to bet against Johnny and have Johnny throw his next fight. This ticks Johnny off to no end, so he decides that he's going to fight honestly and wins the fight by a knockout. As you might imagine, this really angers Cal, who's lost a good $10K. So Cal comes up with a devious scheme. It's fairly obvious that Cal is going to have it in for Johnny and that Johnny is going to realize this, so Cal uses this against Johnny. Johnny has to beat a hasty retreat out of town to avoid Cal's wrath, and Cal uses this to frame Johnny for a murder. The cops will naturally look for Johnny since he's fled town, although for a completely different reason.

Johnny gets on the train and gets a newspaper, which has a blurb about Chris Thorgenson giving up pro sports to take on the ministry, having been given a position in the small town of Longacre, PA. Johnny, now taking the alias Johnny Kilgore, decides to head for Longacre, having remembered the small meeting with Chris a few days earlier. Perhaps Chris can help him, and of course nobody in Longacre will recognize him.

Chris and Johnny arrive almost at the same time. Chris goes to the church where he's going to be the new pastor, and practices a sermon, wanting to win over the congregation. He thinks he's speaking to an empty room because it's late evening and not a Sunday, but sitting there is not Johnny, but a woman: Karen Long (Lois Maxwell), who did her duty during the war as a nurse, but lost her faith as a result; now she's working at the local bank.

Johnny shows up and Chris helps him get a job with the bank, where it seems he and Karen might fall in love. But he knows he's not fit for work like this, and comes to realize that Karen is better off with Chris. Things get more complicated when Johnny's putative girlfriend back in New York starts double-crossing him and finds out Johnny's location.

The Big Punch is the sort of B movie that might have worked a decade earlier, but with the war done, it comes across as decidedly dated. It also doesn't help that neither of the two main leads are properly cast. MacRae shows why he was better at musicals; his is a role that in 1940 could have been played by John Garfield walking in his sleep. And Wayne Morris' performance makes it all too clear that his best fit was as a second banana, especially in the lighter romantic comedies he did at Warner Bros. He probably could have had a long career as a character actor and doing guest starring work on TV if he hadn't died of a heart attack in his mid-40s.