This movie is what I would categorise as a odd duck. On the surface it's a pretty basic movie about a underprivileged family living in a what should be condemned slums interacting with a millionaire who turns out to be the owner of the slum who has something of a moral compass.
There's a kind of romantic plot between said millionaire and one of the women who lives in the tenement houses.
But then the whole thing never materialises into a romantic movie and instead most of the film is spent explaining the horrible conditions that these people live in, during the late thirties.
The weirdest part is that it feels like an early 30s movie*.
There are heavy themes of death, depression, corruption, suppression and an overall sense of dread as a large community of people suffer to make their lives better in a system that is fundamentally designed with an entirely different class of people in mind.
Even the small children seem to have a hard time of it. This young boy who ends up getting crippled after his house was caught on fire and having to force himself to jump out of set house is tormented and belittled by his former best friend because his crippling condition ensures that he can't join them for their basic entertainment. And they mock and ridicule him to high heavens because of it.
The story starts off with a bang as a house fire spread throughout the entire tenement and a bunch of people are killed who are unable to escape the horrible blaze.
It seems the old house is nothing but a giant piece of kindling and there's no safety precautions to ensure other people's well-being. There's this one kid who ends up falling out of the house and shattering one of his legs. A wealthy man who had stopped by to look at the fire takes him to the hospital one decides to pay for the kids medical expenses.
Only later on to discover that he is the owner of the very tenement buildings that went up in flames. Now the millionaire is grief-stricken and unsure of himself in life as he had claimed that the owner of said building should be in jail for their lack of care towards the building.
Most of the film after this is just the one woman from the tenement buildings interacting with the millionaire as they decide what to do about the problem. They tried tearing down the buildings would find that difficult because some of the other wealthy Elite don't want to lose out on land rights. There's a lot of internal conflict with the millionaire has he discovers that he may not be his mature is he was hoping to be.
There are other people who don't believe his integrity and think that all he wants is the love of a woman in a tenement building and then there's the kid who starting to go insane thinking of the building is talking to him and mocking him for his disabilities. Even going as far to show him a past or other kids had lived in the house 70 years ago being infected with polio.
There's just so much to unpack with this movie. It's an anti-corruption pro-equality film leaning with liberal ideas and the message about internal corruption keeping the little man down. The film faced problems at its time as a bunch of conservative groups wanted to destroyed and it would become completely irrelevant in 10 years when the United States would turn towards the Cold War and label any sort of liberal ideas as nothing more than communistic infiltration. Thus ensuring that whatever benefits this film tried to promote were utterly destroyed for over 40 years.
Now the film itself is a little basic. The acting can be a little formulaic for the time and some of the set-pieces (tho well intending) are a little basic to look at. S
o unfortunately I couldn't recommend this to anyone to watch. As it's slower pacing might be a little mundane to certain viewers.
But if you're the kind of person that can stomach a slower-moving film or if you're a fan of stage-plays you might be able to enjoy this movie and exhort the message along with it. Because there really is nothing like this film out there.
It's not often that you see people attacking the wealthy Elite especially before the 1970s wind artistic expression started to lean in a more liberal anti-corporate angle.
It's an interesting film to say the least. I kind of just went through the highlights and didn't really focus on the main story. And maybe that's the best way to go about it.
Because there is a halfway decent movie here to watch.
Even though some of the pacing is a little uneven and there's this weird song towards the end of the film that feels really out of place because it's trying to paint this happy-go-lucky Spirit everything despite the fact that the movie is absolutely miserable when you get down to it. Perhaps there's a cynicism to all that though and your meant to laugh at the perceived positivity of this one weird scene.
*Contacts for those who may not know. The early thirties was a strange time in cinematic history in the United States. As film was becoming more popular and more demanded but there was still no regulation on what you could say and really do.
Then sometime during the mid thirties they introduced what was known as the film code and things like nudity and swearing went straight out the window as most movies became far more conservative in their appeal and general attitude.
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