The Quitter (1934) User Reviews

A certain kind of movie

[bob-717 · 6/10 · 3 May 2001]

The first things that will strike a modern viewer about The Quitter are the very austere sound (no background music, very little noise other than people talking), the "stagey" sets and performances, and the morality-play structure of it all in which most plot developments are telegraphed long before they occur.

If you can't get past these trappings, I don't blame you. If you can, there are some very interesting characters here and a plot that takes the characters' merits and flaws to their logical conclusion. It's not great, and it's not high tragedy, but it is a glimpse into the way people once thought (or once thought they thought).

Also it has Mary from the original Little Rascals playing a "loose" young woman who is nevertheless shown to be good. Better, as it turns out, than the man who attack her for her promiscuity.

Just okay

[dbborroughs · 5/10 · 19 November 2009]

Just okay tale of a family, mother and two sons, struggling to put out their newspaper and grow up. One son wants to change the paper into a society rag. The other son is in love an in constant battle to defend his family and the questionable morals of his girlfriend. Adding complications is the fact their father long thought dead on the battle fields of Eirope is in fact still alive.

Pot boiler of a film is probably the weakest film I've seen from Chesterfield Studios. I've liked pretty much everything I've seen from the tiny studio enough to recommend it, but this time out of the box I'd take a pass. Its not that the film is bad as such, its just that its so over done with such soap opera style over emotion that its very hard to take any of it seriously. I was a good twenty minutes in an realized I didn't care. While I made it to the end I quickly realized it was not my cup of tea and a waste of time. If you like soap opera bathos feel free. All Other steer clear.

The Local Paper

[boblipton · 6/10 · 31 July 2019]

Charley Grapewin enlisted in the army during the First World War and left his wife, Emma Dunn, to run their weekly paper. He never came back, and she raised their two sons. Now there is a crisis going on. The younger son has been sent to military school and the elder, William Bakewell, has returned from college with plans of converting the paper to a daily to compete with the city papers moving in. Also, Grapewin has returned, although he has not told the sons.

It's presented as a two-set play, opened slightly, and director Richard Thorpe has cameraman M.A. Andersen and the unnamed editor breathe some life into the presentation with shifting angles and well-timed cuts. Given the small budgets available to Chesterfield in this period, Thorpe was a fine choice as director. He was one of those directors who could do very well with small budgets.

It's an interesting story about the small-town paper trade, written by Robert Ellis, who was done with acting and directing. He would continue as a screenwriter, mostly for 20th Century-Fox, through 1950 and live to be 82, dying in 1974.

Dead dad didn't die. Did he, daddy? Did he?

[F Gwynplaine MacIntyre · 3/10 · 14 June 2003]

A recurring theme in movies of the 1920s and '30s was the one about the man who simply walks away from his own life and starts over again under a new identity ... occasionally by stealing the identity of a dead man, but often without benefit of any sort of I.D. documents at all. In those days, before Social Security numbers, such an option was possible. The silent-film comedian Larry Semon may be an example of this: for many years, it was understood that Semon died suddenly (at age 39) after declaring bankruptcy; there is now speculation that Semon actually conspired with his relatives to falsely declare his own death so that he could start over in some other profession.

Nowadays, with biometric I.D. cards and computerised fingerprint databases, the plot line about the 'dead' man who starts over is no longer plausible.

'The Quitter' is a small-town drama. Years ago, courageous editor Ed Tilford founded the Forest Park Free Press, an independent weekly newspaper. In 1918, Tilford went to France to cover the war ... and was reported killed in action. For the past 15 years, his widow Cordelia has struggled to keep the paper going while raising her two sons. The poor widow has managed to put her older son Russell through college, and now her younger son is nearing college age ... but he keeps getting into fights with the local louts over the dubious virtues of his girlfriend Annabelle. We're given to understand that the older son is his mother's pride and joy, whilst the second son is the black-sheep scapegrace.

The older son is played by William Bakewell, who usually portrayed patrician villains and spineless cads. Sure enough, Russell Tilford is a snob, who ingratiates himself into high society while shunning his poor old widowed mother. Eventually, Russell takes over the Free Press, which his father founded as a working-class paper. Russell turns it into a high-toned society sheet, but nearly bankrupts the paper in the process ... bringing disgrace and ruination to his mother.

SPOILERS COMING. Oh, yeah. Turns out Ed Tilford didn't die after all. Back in the trench Frenches (I mean, the French trenches) he traded identities with a dead man, and he's been living incognito ever since. Nice husband and father, eh? It's no surprise that the younger son defends the family honour.

Much of this movie is obvious, and quite a bit of it is implausible. Veteran character actor Charley Grapewin gives a fine performance in a badly-written role as Ed Tilford, the forgotten man. I kept wondering if the heroine's name 'Cordelia' was meant to hold some Shakespearean symbolism, but the mother in this movie resembles several other Shakespearean characters (such as Gertrude in 'Hamlet') much more nearly than she resembles the Cordelia in 'King Lear'. I'll rate 'The Quitter' 3 points out of 10. This is one story that's very unlikely to be modernised.

Back from the dead at the most inconvenient of times.

[mark.waltz · 4/10 · 21 January 2016]

Preposterous plot is told in an entertaining manner as a long believed dead man returns just as his widow begins to consider remarriage and his two sons fight over both control and independence. Charley Grapewin, best known for "The Wizard of Oz", "The Grapes of. Wrath" and "Tobacco Road" is the Enoch Arden of the plot, having disappeared after the end of the first World War, and Emma Dunn, Dr. Village's mother, is the alleged widow, calmly dealing with his return, seemingly not shocked by it either.

The feuding sons are William Bakewell and Glen Boles who can't stand each other. Bakewell, typecast as the cocky older brother determined to control everybody, is given a few tender moments, but it is very difficult to like him. Boles, the wide-eyed innocent, is in love with a girl with the worst reputation in town. Dunn tries to keep peace, while Grapewin secretly steps in to advise the younger brother. Hale Hamilton is tossed into the mix as the old family friend who instantly recognizes Grapewin even though it has been over 15 years since he disappeared. I hate to use the cliché "by the numbers" to describe how this plot was put together, but the situations that occur are just so generic as the follow the previous one. Other than Bakewell, however, all of the characters are extremely likable, yet sometimes just too nice. A well written confrontation between the two brothers is the dramatic highlight of the film.

The destruction of Dunn's newspaper is caused by Bakewell's cockiness which turns off creditors, advertisers and regular readers. I got a huge thrill of watching him loose control by taking too much control, and letting his ego destroy him. It almost seems like he wasn't really Grapewin and Dunn's son. Boles, in spite of his immaturity, is the more idealistic and his immaturity is never annoying. Pretty lavish production design for a poverty row studio makes this a lot better in spite of the outlandish plot. Sudden changes in the conclusion don't ring true, wrapping it up all too neatly without a shred of believability.