Follow us on Facebook Follow us on Twitter Watch us on Youtube Join the Archive Mailing List Read our Blog

Quick Millions (1931);
Now I'll Tell (1934)

Quick Millions (1931)
January 18, 2012 - 7:30 pm

Quick Millions (1931)

Directed by Rowland Brown

Tracy found a meaty role as a truck driver who becomes a corrupt organizer through manipulation and thuggery even as he longs to go legit. Trading up to a more genteel girlfriend, and legal business, are all futile; Bugs is doomed, as the genre dictates. But Tracy leaves a surprisingly charming mark on a character type that he would be glad to escape in just a few years: the “mug.”

Fox Film Corp. Screenwriter: R. Brown, Courtenay Terrett. Cinematographer: Joseph August. Editor: Harold Schuster. Cast: Spencer Tracy, Marguerite Churchill, John Wray, Warner Richmond, Sally Eilers.

35mm, b/w, 69 min.

Now I'll Tell (1934)

Directed by Edwin Burke

An unusual bit of tabloid journalism packaged as film entertainment, this picture dramatizes the true confessions of the wife of America’s most famous Jewish gangster, Arnold Rothstein, renamed “Murray Golden” and portrayed by Tracy. Working his way up the criminal food chain, Golden winds up bested by his own ambition in this portrait of a driven man brought low by hubris.

Fox Film Corp. Producer: Winfield Sheehan. Screenwriter: Edwin Burke. Cinematographer: Ernest Palmer. Editor: Harold Schuster. Cast: Spencer Tracy, Helen Twelvetrees, Alice Fay, Robert Gleckler, Henry O’Neill.

35mm, b/w, 87 min.