Quick Millions (1931)

Director:

Rowland Brown

Writers:

Rowland Brown (screenplay)
Rowland Brown (story)

Release Date:

3 May 1931 (USA)

Genre:

Crime | Drama

Plot:

Truck driver Bugs Raymond organizes the trucking associations and takes protection money. Now rich, he decides to marry socialite Dorothy Stone...

Cast

Spencer Tracy	...	Daniel J. 'Bugs' Raymond
Marguerite Churchill	...	Dorothy Stone
Sally Eilers	...	Daisy De Lisle
Bob Burns	...	'Arkansas' Smith (as Robert Burns)
John Wray	...	Kenneth Stone
Warner Richmond	...	'Nails' Markey
George Raft	...	Jimmy Kirk
John Swor	...	Contractor
Leon Ames	...	Hood (as Leon Waycoff)

Runtime:

72 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

1.37 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono

Company:

Fox Film Corporation

Trivia:

Movie debut of Leon Ames.

Quotes:

Daniel J. 'Bugs' Raymond: Never argue with a truck driver. They're always right.

Movie Connections:

Referenced in Railroaded! (1947)

"Racketeering's just getting what the other guy's got, in a nice way."

This film marked an early career milestone for Spencer Tracy. He'd scored a sensation on Broadway as a tough convict in "The Last Mile" in 1930, at the very moment when the Hollywood studios were desperate to recruit stage talent for the brand-new talkies. Fox snapped him up and put him in a couple of Movietone shorts, then had him make his feature debut in a hastily produced B-movie called UP THE RIVER (which featured another still-unknown stage performer, Humphrey Bogart). But QUICK MILLIONS was Tracy's first starring role in a prestige picture, Fox's high-profile entry in the hottest genre of the day, the gangster saga. The picture is built entirely around Tracy's character, Bugs Raymond, and the plot traces the rise-and-fall trajectory of his career in a fashion that was already becoming standard for crime kingpin stories.

QUICK MILLIONS is an interesting, well-written movie that offers some colorful supporting characters and several memorable scenes, but it's not hard to see why it was overshadowed by the other gangster movies of its day, the ones with flamboyant central characters and lots of shoot-outs. Spencer Tracy's Bugs Raymond is a smart racketeer who plans his moves carefully and gets his strong-arm guys to do the dirty work-- dirty work that generally takes place elsewhere, so he doesn't have to see it. As the man himself says: "I'm just a guy with a one-ton brain who's too nervous to steal and too lazy to work. I do other people's thinking for them and make them like it." He's no angry kid from the slums, no mad-dog killer with an antisocial streak; he's a cool customer who uses basic business practices (backed by the threat of violence) to get what he wants.

When the story begins Bugs is still a truck driver getting into foolish scrapes with the law. His girl nearly walks out on him, but when he tells her that he's been working out the "angles" to achieve material success we believe him, and before long he's taken over the trucking business and is forcing the city's respectable businessmen to kowtow to him. Some of his associates are irredeemable low-life hoodlums with no ethical standards at all, but Bugs makes it clear that there are limits to what he will and will not countenance. Raymond's new status brings him into contact with prominent civic leaders and their families, and he begins to clean up his act. He actually dons evening clothes and attends the opera. Unfortunately for him, however, the old gang doesn't take it well when "Mr. Raymond" puts on airs and aspires to class. Like many another gangland chieftain, Bugs' fatal mistake comes when he forgets where he came from and how he got to the top, and treats his partners in crime like they're poor relations he's come to consider an embarrassment. In the end he pays for this mistake in traditional gangland style.

For a gangster flick this movie is remarkably non-violent. There is an undercurrent of potential violence that charges several scenes, but when violent events are shown they are usually handled in an oblique, stylized way. (We know that Bugs Raymond strikes his girlfriend, but unlike Tom Powers in THE PUBLIC ENEMY he does so off-camera.) The focal point here is Bugs Raymond's perversely creative use of American business techniques, and the subsequent hubris that brings him down. It should be added, however, that the screenplay does not let Raymond off the hook: he's still a thug, and no better than any other racketeer, just a little smarter (for awhile, anyway) and less willing to get his hands dirty.

This is a film that deserves to be better known, and for fans of the gangster genre it's a must, but first-time viewers should be aware that QUICK MILLIONS is more talky and cerebral than most of its peers, and a little slow going at times. The dialog is generally sharp, but there are also scenes that could have been trimmed, and a couple of plot points that are never adequately explained. Bugs Raymond does not leave the indelible impression made by Edward G. Robinson's Rico Bandello in LITTLE CAESAR, Jimmy Cagney's Tom Powers, or Paul Muni's Tony Camonte in the 1932 version of SCARFACE. Still, this rarely-shown movie is well worth seeing for a number of good scenes, a memorable finale, and a great party sequence where hit-man George Raft performs a sinuous soft shoe dance to "Frankie and Johnny" shortly before gunning a man down. That's worth the price of admission right there!