Don't be fooled by the posters advertising or even by people's uploads on the internet.
They claim this movie stars Edward Arnold but unfortunately he's just a secondary character.
A very good secondary character and the best performance in the whole movie. But for the most part we're stuck with his (in character) son play by John Agar.
Who does an okay performance, he supposed to play this semi naïve idealist who wants to improve the working condition of his father's business. But he's performance comes off as a bit dull and uninteresting.
The romance between him and Susan Morrow is a real snoozefest. It comes out of nowhere, it feels undeserved, it's not given enough time to grow and it makes a relatively short movie feel unnecessarily long.
In fact a lot of the acting in this movie is very strange and low energy.
Almost as if they're trying to do an educational video on how to properly use a piece of equipment or talk to you about provincial elections statistics.
I have no idea why they went in that direction.
It's a shame because the overall premise is all right.
A young man is about to inherit his father's business and his father is a stereotypical money-grubbing Gilded Age fellow who works his employees hard, has tight control over their work conditions and even living conditions and is an overall unpredictable miserable man to be around.
Which he wants to impart on to his son to continue the family business and keep the corporate Empire afloat as it were.
But his son thinks that if he improved the Workforce it could lead to an improved business and thus wants to help the people by granting them Fair work hours, better working conditions and just a better standard of living. So they can be more productive with a company overall.
It's a lesson his father isn't going to learn until the last 10 minutes of the film when he tries to literally beat his son with a cane, than realizing just how far his greed is taking him.
It all sounds a lot more interesting than it is because our main character is just not that captivating and if this movie was 30 minutes shorter it wouldn't be a problem.
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