I wonder how much more than two seconds it took to come up with this movie's title as we tag along with a ragtag group of electrical linemen tasked with keeping America's lights on through fair weather and foul (and is there ever a lot of foul, going by what happens here). Heading up the team are best-buddies George Raft and Edward G Robinson with as female interest, an added dollop of Marlene Dietrich on the side, a cast you'd think think screams gangster flick, although to be fair this particular occupation seems a whole lot more dangerous, despite being on the right side of the law.
Anyway, the characterisations, such as they are, are these. Robinson is the hot-headed, girl-chasing pocket rocket while Raft, his best mate and minder is the dapper, level-headed one. With their unruly but largely good-natured colleagues, including most prominently Alan Hale and Frank McHugh as a goofy double act on the side, they're on perpetual call-out when something happens to disrupt the national grid, usually it seems a ferocious storm of biblical proportions. When one of the vets on the team comes a predictable cropper on site, he asks Raft and Robinson to look after his adult daughter, Dietrich, who's just been released from prison and promptly returns to waitressing at a seedy clip-joint where she and the other young women, including Eve Arden are expected to fleece the ever more intoxicated clientele.
Eddie takes to the girl immediately so much so that he soon proposes to her even though she's not attracted to him. George on the other hand finds that the "treat 'em mean, keep 'em keen," caveman-approach works better because soon enough, despite his treating Marlene with suspicion, disdain and even a dose of physical violence, of course it's him she falls for, predicating the triangle which sure enough will break by the film's climax, as the duo fight it out at 50 feet atop live electricity lines with Dietrich looking on from below.
It's all high-flying nonsense of course. The attitudes to women throughout are Neanderthal with any "dame" in a skirt fair game for a manhandling, be they nurses, costumiers or waitresses. The work the guys do too would keep Health and Safety in work for decades, there's such disregard for personal wellbeing, it's no wonder fatalities are commonplace. I also didn't enjoy the puerile antics of Hale and McHugh finding them old-fashioned and unfunny.
Raoul Walsh does his usual breakneck, man's world direction job, which means there's lots of testosterone, bonhomie, and fisticuffs, Raft and Robinson do their best in their exaggerated roles while Dietrich seems to be acting in a different film all together, all cliches of the hard-boiled working girl softened by an even tougher male played out one more time.
I suspect that the movie's heart might have started out in the right place as being masculine, knockabout entertainment but really its outdated treatment of the women in the cast is quite offensive at times and fatally wings a film that I don't think is any anywhere near to being a career highlight for either the distinguished director or his equally distinguished cast.
