Robert Wilcox and Judith Barrett billed above Cesar Romero??? You'll never see THAT billing again! Like I said in my title, this is pretty much your standard crime drama focusing on the employees of one armored car company, the creatively named "Banks Company", and the hoodlums that are out to hold up those armored cars with no regard for life or limb of said armored car company employees.
The first half of the film basically focuses on the camaraderie between the armored car employees and could almost be relabeled "Fun and Friendship Among the Working Class in the Depression". It really has nothing to do with the crime part of the film which is the focus of the last half of the film.
The crooks are not your standard bad guys in these low budget crime films of the 30's. Irving Pichel plays the head of the criminal gang. He wears thick glasses and insists that the hoods that work for him sit through his organ recitals of classical music. Cesar Romero excels as the head hood who knows the boss is screwy with all of this classical music talk, but will put up with it because he knows the boss is smart and in the meantime he's making a good living.
On the "good guy" side of the cast you'll probably recognize Harry Davenport as Pop Logan, dispatcher for the Banks company, and most famously Dr. Meade in Gone with the Wind two years later. Inez Courtney of the early sound musicals and precodes, gives a particularly good comic turn here as the blind date to one of the armored car drivers. The rest of the cast is pretty much anonymous, which is what Universal had to settle for in the early days after the Laemmles lost the studio in 1936 and so many of the talents they were developing at the time left with them.
It's a pretty good story overall, and worth a look for the novelty of it all.
The first half of the film basically focuses on the camaraderie between the armored car employees and could almost be relabeled "Fun and Friendship Among the Working Class in the Depression". It really has nothing to do with the crime part of the film which is the focus of the last half of the film.
The crooks are not your standard bad guys in these low budget crime films of the 30's. Irving Pichel plays the head of the criminal gang. He wears thick glasses and insists that the hoods that work for him sit through his organ recitals of classical music. Cesar Romero excels as the head hood who knows the boss is screwy with all of this classical music talk, but will put up with it because he knows the boss is smart and in the meantime he's making a good living.
On the "good guy" side of the cast you'll probably recognize Harry Davenport as Pop Logan, dispatcher for the Banks company, and most famously Dr. Meade in Gone with the Wind two years later. Inez Courtney of the early sound musicals and precodes, gives a particularly good comic turn here as the blind date to one of the armored car drivers. The rest of the cast is pretty much anonymous, which is what Universal had to settle for in the early days after the Laemmles lost the studio in 1936 and so many of the talents they were developing at the time left with them.
It's a pretty good story overall, and worth a look for the novelty of it all.
