The Shakedown

#27 in my ranking of William Wyler’s filmography.

Skipping ahead three years, missing most of the Blue Streak series as well as a couple of others that seem to be lost, we come to William Wyler’s boxing drama/comedy The Shakedown. After two of these early silent films from Wyler, I’m itching even more for finding ways to discover the rest of his silent filmography. There’s a confidence and competence to the storytelling and filmmaking while Wyler’s visual acuity grows by leaps and bounds. It’s interesting to see a studio director so early in the history of film already so accomplished artistically. He’s not making art, but he’s making solidly entertaining films consistently. That’s no small thing.

Dave Roberts (James Murray) is part of a con that involves him going into a small town, building up his reputation as a fighter, before a show comes to town centered around Battling Roff (George Kotsonaros) where anyone who can last four rounds with him will win one thousand dollars. The con is to build up this challenger, increase betting in his favor, and Dave tanks the fight. In the town they start in, the effort leads to less than stellar results, and Dave is sent out ahead for the next bout with orders to make himself better known, maybe even by saving someone’s life.

Working on an oil rig, he makes a connection with the small diner’s waitress, Marjorie (Barbara Kent), enjoying this life of work and nice interactions with a pretty young woman. When the homeless orphan Clem (Jack Hanlon) steals a pie from the diner, Dave chases after him, eventually saving the boy after he falls and hits his head on a train rail as trains come passing by. The two form a quick connection since Dave showed Clem a modicum of decency and Dave has no one else to form any kind of connection with. It’s a happy coincidence, then, that Clem notices Dave’s fighter-like physique and offers to train him for that bout with Roff that’s coming to town.

I think it’s easy to see where all of this is going to go. It’s predictable, but much like the success of The Stolen Ranch relied on solidly built character, so does the success of The Shakedown. Dave is obviously the central focus of the film, and the key relationship is his big brother-like interaction with Clem. He becomes something of an idol to the child while the child because his key relationship that feels genuine, showing off his ability to box to the kid’s benefit against Dugan (Harry Gribbon), sent to check up on Dave before the arrival of Roff.

The truth eventually comes out, despite Dave’s best efforts, predicated on Clem getting into fights on the street with other kids, a series of actions that lead to threats from the authorities to send him to some kind of reform school. The last one includes some words about how Dave is a fraud, which leads to Dave admitting to Marjorie. That’s his down and out moment, right when Roff and the rest of the con show up in town, and Dave decides to turn it all around, leading to a real boxing match instead of a thrown one.

And you know what? It works. It works because Dave is a likeable guy that we want to win, to turn his life around, to get the girl. It’s well-worn cliché now, but that doesn’t keep the fact that this sort of cliché can work when the ground is laid well enough beforehand, and Wyler and his writers Charles Logue and Clarence Marks do just that. There are great moments in the fight when we watch Marjorie from the wings, consumed with guilt because she pushed him into the fight, and he starts losing.

Is it deep stuff? Not at all. Is it entertaining? Very much so. Murray as Dave has a likeable air about him as he dodges punches while standing on a handkerchief or saves Clem from the rail and gives him knocks on the chin for what he risked for the kid’s life. Hanlon gets into amusing little faceoffs with Gribbon as they contort their faces in antagonism against each other. Kent is pretty and earnest as Marjorie, especially in the film’s ending.

Wyler really was in a good place this early in his career. Visually, he was developing the kind of three-dimensional framing that he would later go on to use so effectively in larger films. There’s a great shot early where Roff is at a bar in the left third of the frame while we can see the door to the outdoors in the rest of the frame, in which Dave and a woman interact as part of the con that will continue its play a moment later. It’s great to look at while providing key information quickly and efficiently.

Wyler was an extremely talented filmmaker from the beginning, it seems. It also seems that his talent extended well beyond the markers of the physical production. That both of these early films are built on solid scripts does not feel like a coincidence. Different sets of writers, but the same eye towards character in well-worn fictional genres, all done in a way to make the well-worn movements of plot impact rather than just play out? If Wyler didn’t have a hand in that crafting, then he was just getting lucky, and I don’t think he was just getting lucky.

Rating: 3/4