The Rogues’ Tavern (1935)
IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 10 minutes, rated 5.1/10.0 by 333 cinematizens.
Genre: Old Dark House
Verdict: A well lit Old Dark House.
Wallace Ford rocks up at the Rogues’ Tavern, aka the Old Dark House, with his fiancée to cross the state line for a quickie … wedding. With that mind and little else, they could not pass by a place called Rogues’ Tavern. the more so one possessed of a possessive apostrophe. Wallace does his best, as always, to inject some energy and wit into the catatonic proceedings. This is a classroom specimen for a film school assignment: which is worse? The leaden direction or the directionless screenplay. Tough call there.
Gathered at the Tavern (which had none of the furnishing that the word ‘tavern’ calls to mind, spilled beer, overflowing ashtrays, dart boards, big screens, buxom barmaids, a fetid atmosphere) where an assortment of crooks sit around looking crooked in very long takes. After the third take, the fraternity brothers dozed off.
Along for the fun – aside: that’s an ironic comment – is a femme who reads tarot cards like the telephone book. Slowly without inflection. More very long takes of her looking at the camera.
There is a dog howling on the sound track, perhaps pained by watching the film, a face peering in the windows from behind coke bottle bottom lenses. It did not require a degree in scriptwriting to recognise the colour of these herrings.
These are the high points. The rest is worse. Believe it or not, Ripley!
But, as every review of this sludge notes, it has a surprise ending, which, while nothing can redeem the sludge, certainly demands and gets attention. The villain has a lot to say and says it, though a few lessons from Bart Simpson on maniacal laughing would have helped. The last one standing was of course the villain but even so the speech is a rarity. That may explain the inflated rating of 5.1 when nothing else could.
Wallace Ford had a biography more tortured than any imagined by Charles Dickens. That is hard to square with the sunny disposition he always projected on the screen. Born in England an unwanted baby he was taken into an overflowing foundling home. In a few weeks he was packed with others and dispatched to a colonial orphanage in Toronto from whence he was enslaved to seventeen foster homes before he ran away to join the circus, more or less literally – The Winnipeg Kiddies. While a teenager he and a pal rode the rails to New York. Along the way, his pal was killed in a rail-yard accident hopping freight trains in a switching yard and Wallace took his name as a tribute. Stage struck, his fresh face, energy, willingness to do anything got him work on Broadway and led to his two hundred IMDb credits. In Hollywood he starred in B movies and when these evaporated he became a character actor in movies and then a regular guest star on television.