Torrid Zone (1940)

"Torrid Zone" was the final film with real life friends, James Cagney and Pat O' Brien. They made several memorable films together for the studio, "Angels With Dirty Faces" being the best. The above is a light-hearted and amusing film about the various struggles on a Mexican plantation. The script is fairly standard but the cast really a lot to the screenplay by giving good performances and demonstrating a flair for light comedy. Ann Sheridan is a very good leading lady for James Cagney. She plays a card shark and nightclub singer who is on the run. They and O' Brien play off each other to amusing effect. The gunfight scenes add a bit to the proceedings as well.Released in 1940, "Torrid Zone" probably did respectable business at the box office.

This movie was made right in the heart of the period when Hollywood was using one road-tested plot and just switching location and names and the fact that Jerry Wald - widely believed to be the prototype for Sammy Glick in Budd Schulberg's What Makes Sammy Run- is credited as producer adds credence as Wald was noted for 'stealing' ideas, plots, and/or anything that wasn't nailed down. Other posters have viewed this as The Front Page in drag but I find more parallels with the previous year's Only Angels Have Wings; tropical setting, incompetent professional (Cowan, Barthelmess) married to joint love interest (Vinson, Hayworth), 'adventuress' (Arthur, Sheridan) allowed to remain only on sufferance, plus outside factors (bandits, weather) affecting the efficiency of US-owned interests (bananas, mail). Hawks' movie had a classier cast - Cary Grant, Jean Arthur, Rita Hayworth, Thomas Mitchell - than Keithley's and overall was the classier movie but Torrid Zone gives almost as good as it gets and should not be dismissed lightly.

It's one of those movies about the tropics, in this instance somewhere in the Caribbean or Central America, in which women are loose and the men all wear white suits and panama hats, except when they're out in the jungle and sport pith helmets, riding breeches, and boots.Pat O'Brien is the manager of a fruit company and James Cagney is his subordinate in charge of the isolated Plantation Number Seven or something like that. You have rarely heard such fast and zippy dialog. The two of them speak with more speed than I can THINK. Many of the usual Warners stalwarts show up, including George Tobias as a cheerful revolutionary leader who wants his land back. Ann Sheridan is the peripatetic, tough-talking babe, who falls for Cagney, although I don't know why -- he's constantly pushing her around and telling her to get the hell out. William Keighley directed.Nothing in or about the movie is to be taken seriously. Not the fist fights, not the arguments, not Sheridan's mooning over Cagney, not the shoot outs, not the hair-rising escapes from disaster, not O'Brien's conundrum in which he must hire Cagney as his best worker even though he hates him. Certainly not Tobias's revolution. Twice, Tobias is about to be shot by the Guardia Civil or whatever that agency is called -- you know, the one that works for United Fruit Company? Tobias is casual, philosophical, about the prospect of being shot at dawn. He treats his imminent death as an irritant, an annoyance, as if it's going to interfere with a big date he'd planned for tomorrow night.I didn't give a fig about any of it. It didn't matter to me if Sheridan married Cagney or O'Brien, or decided to enter a nunnery. But it's not intended to be the kind of movie in which you are deeply moved. You're supposed to be entertained. And the movie achieves it goal. Everyone darts around and throws barbs at everyone else. There's action aplenty in the studio-bound tropics. Put up your hands. "I tink I shoot you as a matter of convenience."

Life at a banana plantation must have its compensations, judging from the way things turn out in this fast-moving, wise-cracking comedy directed stylishly by William Keighley. PAT O'BRIEN is the hard-nosed manager of a plantation who needs his former overseer's help in keeping some criminal elements from causing too much trouble. So JAMES CAGNEY comes back to help him--but trouble brews when he and O'Brien quarrel over red-headed ANN SHERIDAN, who just about walks off with the film's best lines.It's strictly a Warner comedy-melodrama with stock players turning up in some good supporting roles, particularly GEORGE TOBIAS, ANDY DEVINE, JEROME COWAN and, in a small role, GEORGE (Superman) REEVES.The real surprise of the film is ANN SHERIDAN, handling herself in every situation as a gal to be reckoned with. It's fun all the way.