Manpower - Warner Archive Collection

Manpower is one of those smorgasbord movies that lays everything out on the table and allows the audience to pick and choose the morsels they like best. You want action? It's there. Romance? There's a lopsided love triangle. There's also infantile slapstick comedy galore, plenty of male bonding and brawling, some illicit activity thrown in for good measure, and even a musical number. Do all those elements meld together into a cohesive whole? Not quite.

Director Raoul Walsh tries his best to make sense of all the nonsense, and somehow manages to churn out a surprisingly entertaining motion picture, but he's often handcuffed by a schizophrenic script that revolves around the dangerous work utility repairmen must perform on power lines while battling severe weather conditions. The premise of Manpower is electric (pardon the pun), but almost everything that happens when the linemen are off the clock short-circuits the film. Thankfully, Walsh's fast-and-furious approach leaves little time to dwell on the silly, disjointed plot, but if screenwriters Richard Macaulay and Jerry Wald had only trimmed the fat and concentrated more fully on the unsung workers and their often harrowing job, Manpower would have been leaner, meaner, and more engrossing.

Manpower - warts and all - fits squarely into the Warner Bros 1940s moviemaking mold. It's slick, brash, and bolstered by big stars and an army of colorful supporting players. It made a ton of money for the studio in 1941, but time hasn't been especially kind to this cinematic hodgepodge. Though a couple of tense, nail-biting sequences depicting the precise, perilous tasks the men must perform on high-voltage wires that could fry them to a crisp in a heartbeat remain thrilling, the rest is just a bunch of clichés strung haphazardly together.

There's a lot going on in Manpower, but the basic plot is pretty threadbare. Hank McHenry (Edward G. Robinson) and Johnny Marshall (George Raft) are best buds and fellow utility workers whose friendship is tested by the stresses of their profession and mutual attraction to Fay Duval (Marlene Dietrich), the daughter of an aged colleague who dies on the job. Fay has a checkered past and goes to work as a nightclub "hostess" after getting released from prison. Hank, who walks with a limp due to a job-related leg injury, relentlessly pursues Fay and convinces her to marry him even though she doesn't love him, but their passionless union makes Fay restless, so guess who she gravitates toward when the loneliness becomes too tough to take?

Robinson and Raft lock horns on screen, but they reportedly really got into it on the set during the shoot. At one point even the Screen Actor's Guild got involved after episodes of verbal abuse and physical scuffling caused production delays. Both men reportedly vied for Dietrich off-screen, so that caused friction, and Raft, who didn't hide his opinion that Robinson was miscast, resented Robinson tinkering with the dialogue and giving him acting tips. In addition, both Raft and Dietrich were reprimanded for demanding high-class costumes that didn't suit their respective low-class characters. With so much chaos occuring on practically a daily basis, it's a wonder the movie got made at all.

Despite their off-screen animosity, Robinson and Raft make a solid team, and after you know the film's backstory, their bruising on-screen confrontations feel more authentic. Robinson is the more lively of the two, and though he and Dietrich make one of filmdom's oddest couples, they share some nice moments. Dietrich and Raft should smolder, but never generate much heat, and Dietrich looks uncharacteristically bored throughout, maybe because her part is sketchily drawn and her character's motivations often don't make much sense.

The Warner stock company picks up the slack, but such stalwarts as Alan Hale and Frank McHugh are saddled with buffoonish roles that they massively overplay. Barton MacLane and Ward Bond fare a little better, and of course the sardonic Eve Arden enlivens every film in which she appears. In Manpower, she plays one of Dietrich's wise-cracking clip joint gal pals, while the equally sassy Joyce Compton plays the other with her patented simpering Southern charm.

Another interesting bit of Manpower trivia concerns bit player Virginia Hill, who portrays a nightclub hatcheck girl. She has one throwaway line in a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment, but the significance of her participation in the film looms much larger. The day she shot her scene just happened to be the day gangster Bugsy Siegel, one of the mobsters who would put Las Vegas on the map, dropped by the set. Their instant attraction soon sparked a long-term relationship that would last until Bugsy got bumped off in 1947. A half-century later, their introduction to each other on the Manpower set would be reenacted by Warren Beatty and Annette Bening in the 1991 film Bugsy.

Manpower can't muscle its way out of the problems that plague it, but if you check your brain at the door and roll with the punches, you'll probably enjoy this rough-and-tumble, testosterone-infused film. Walsh is the best in the business for this type of fare and he works wonders with the material. It's just a shame the material isn't better.

Vital Disc Stats: The Blu-ray

Manpower arrives on Blu-ray packaged in a standard case. Video codec is 1080p/AVC MPEG-4 and audio is DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono. Once the disc is inserted into the player, the static menu without music immediately pops up; no previews or promos precede it.

From the moment the opening titles flash on the screen, it's evident the Manpower transfer is going to knock our socks off, and that's just what it does for 103 minutes. The new HD master struck from a 4K scan of the original nitrate camera negative is sleek, vibrant, and yet incredibly film-like, faithfully honoring the cinematography of the supremely talented Ernest Haller, who won an Oscar for Gone with the Wind and received six other nominations. Clarity, contrast, and shadow delineation are all excellent, with lush, sharp close-ups showcasing Dietrich's allure, Robinson's rubbery face, and Raft's angular features.

Blacks are dense and inky (yet crush is kept at bay most of the time), the bright whites resist blooming, and wonderfully varied grays enhance depth. Fine details are striking, most notably the flurry of driving raindrops during a couple of lengthy downpours. Costumes textures are visible, Dietrich's jewels sparkle, and no nicks, dirt, or scratches mar the pristine source. I don't own the 2012 DVD, but you can bet it doesn't hold a candle to this superb Blu-ray rendering.

The DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono track outputs robust sound...maybe, at times, too robust. There are a lot competing effects in Manpower - torrential rain, noisy trucks, loud machinery, crashing thunder, crowded nightclubs - and they're so crisp and impactful they sometimes make the rapid-fire dialogue difficult to comprehend. On the flip side, it's refreshing to watch a classic movie that contains so many elements of aural interest. A wide dynamic scale handles all the highs and lows of the music score by three-time Oscar-winner Adolph Deutsch, strong bass frequencies supply some heft, and no age-related hiss, pops, or crackle intrude. Despite the occasional cacophonies, this is a solid track that will please fans of the film.

Just a couple of vintage extras are included on the disc.

• Vintage Cartoon: Snowtime for Comedy (HD, 7 minutes) - This Looney Tunes cartoon charts the wintry (mis)adventures of two pups in the frozen tundra.
• Vintage Cartoon: Joe Glow the Firefly (HD, 7 minutes) - This black-and-white Looney Tunes cartoon follows the miniscule titular firefly as he traverses the terrain of a sleeping man and some objects in his kitchen.

Robinson, Dietrich, Raft, and the top-notch Warner stock company supply the juice that fuels Manpower, and though this macho drama occasionally blows a fuse, it still provides plenty of entertainment. The sublime 4K scan of the original nitrate camera negative and remastered audio add to the appeal of this slick, sassy film. Recommended. 

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