And Sudden Death (1936)

And Sudden Death (1936)


Plot

An heiress with a penchant for speeding runs afoul of a traffic cop. Romance develops between the two, but it's soon complicated when he believes she is responsible for killing someone due to reckless driving.

The last Randolph Scott movie for the foreseeable future I believe is an interesting artifact. This is one of those movies that haven't aged very well at all. This is basically like one of the MGM Crime Does Not Pay shorts done up with a B film flourish. Now that's not to say it's a bad movie per se as I think it probably played to audiences in 1936 a helluva better than it does to anyone watching it today.

Scott plays James Knox who's the head of the traffic division and a very studious and upright cop who involved in the case of Betty Winslow (Frances Drake) who's the daughter of a retail magnate. She's been sent to his office after her 4th speeding ticket in the space of a month and basically shows very little in regards to her actions. Knox has Winslow sent to court and taken to driving school. What's interesting about this is that the basic structure of classes for those caught speeding and whatnot hasn't changed much at all as Knox talks about the facts and figures, shows a film of car crashes and then takes the students to a morgue to see dead bodies of those who've been killed in accidents.

Eventually Knox and Winslow become an item and they're invited to a social event separately. Well at the end of the event Winslow decides to drive her drunk brother Jackie (Tom Brown) home and we get our second interesting peek at police auto inspections in its embryonic stage. They held her up for a brake test where the cop hooked up a machine to the floor board and rode on the board as the driver goes up to 30 mp/h then hit on the brakes as hard as they can. The cop then measures how good the brakes are by how long it takes the car to come to a full stop. Anyways, it turns out the car she's driving needs new brakes ASAP and she's told not to drive over 30 mp/h the rest of the way.

She and her brother make a stop for cigarettes and he takes over control of the car and talks her into driving whereupon he goes careening down the road causing a bus full of kids to crash. One of those kids ends up dying at the operating table. The catch though is that Betty tries to cover for her brother and takes over behind the wheel when the cops come to the scene so it looks like it was her doing the reckless driving and she's now on trial for 2nd degree murder.

Jackie obviously feels bad about the whole thing and promises he'll talk to Knox and clear the air but alas he's too much of a chicken. So will Betty take the rap for him or will Knox find a way to clear her name? You'd have to see to find out but it's pretty clear what will happen.

Like I said, this movie plays like a very preachy (especially in the first 20 minutes of a slightly over 1 hr movie) film at times and then it becomes slightly too melodramatic for its own good. That being said, I thought Scott was uniformly good and he had wonderful chemistry with Drake especially in the scene when they're going to the social event and her car breaks down. They find themselves in a model home for sale and they have a bit of a domestic, slightly comic scene together. The problem lies in that this movie just doesn't play at all well for a modern audience but you have to look at the context of the times. This movie was trying to educate on the dangers of the road when the automobile as a necessity was only a decade into it's lifespan. The scene of the car inspection was fascinating because it would take another decade for roadside inspections and such to become uniform throughout the US. So you really got a peek at what it was like before things became standardized to an extent.

I give this * 1/2 stars not because it was bad but just that it hasn't aged well. Like I said i'm sure audiences back in '36 found it far more valuable than us today.