User reviews

With his eponymous company facing bankruptcy, owner "F. X. Benedik" is found slain and it falls to his son "Tony" (John Longden) to try to track down the curmudgeonly "Marsh" (Stewart Rome) who has an axe to grind with the business and might be implicated. This is probably only notable as being Michael Powell's directorial debut - and for a talkie only just out of nappies, there is quite a lot of movement and outdoor photography to help distinguish it from many of it's more drab, stage-bound, contemporaries. Otherwise, though, it's an unremarkable little whodunit with little jeopardy and way too much script. Rome does a decent enough job as the irritating "Marsh" and Dorothy Boyd ("Peter") brings a touch of glamour, though little of substance, as the mystery gradually unfolds - but don't expect much of a challenge for your own little grey cells, that's all a bit of a no-brainer.

Michael Powell's first surviving film is his third with sole credit, the first two, Two Crowded Hours and My Friend the King being considered lost. Rynox was part of series of films that Powell made that were called quota quickies, short 4-5 reel films with minimal budgets (reportedly for this it was only about five thousand pounds), and very abbreviated shooting schedules. These were the kinds of film that Capra thought he was making: akin to newspapers to be watched once and discarded. I'm glad that some exist at least.

Rynox was made at one of the most awkward points in history: the first couple of years of the sound era. It's obvious that the production company he was working for, Film Engineering, wasn't a dominant force in the English film scene at the time, so that this film's soundscape feels like it was plucked right from the earliest of Hollywood sound films 2 years prior is not much of a surprise. Reverse shots have completely different ambient levels of noise not quite at the same level of John Ford's football game in Salute, but it's close. And the lack of musical score takes moments that could be just standard and quiet into awkwardly stilted. It's just part of that growing period of early sound that every filmmaker had to figure out (except, well, Lubitsch), and Powell is the first filmmaker I've discovered who started right at that beginning.

Anyway, the story is about the titular company Rynox owned by F. X. Benedik (Stewart Rome). The company has serious debt problems, and Benedik is being pestered by a strange bum named Boswell Marsh. He assures his business partner that all will be well soon, making brief mention of some materials, a rubber substitute, that will work out for them (I'm not entirely sure what Rynox does). His son, Tony (John Longden), is engaged to his business partner's daughter, Peter (Dorothy Boyd).

Really, there's not a whole lot of story here because the film is only 46 minutes long. The opening is stilted exposition with people talking in F. X.'s office, and it's a small slog. There are introductions of our minor characters, one of whom never seems to go anywhere, their treasurer Samuel (Charles Paton) who is talked about becoming a partner but which doesn't affect anything, and it highlights how the film is just too short for its own good. The treasurer is just a bit of a dead zone, but the real problem is Tony.

Tony is barely introduced, mostly just as F. X.'s son and Peter's fiancé while Peter (that name is throwing me, because it's definitely a girl) ends up the main focus of their introductory scene. However, Tony becomes the focus in the final sequence, including getting into a fight with Captain James (Edmund Willard), who has a secret that he's threatening to make public if he doesn't get paid off. It leads to a fight that ends up unnecessary, consciously so, with Tony talking about how James couldn't understand why he got into the fight. And I don't understand why he got into the fight.

Listen, I don't think this 45-minute film needs to be two-and-a-half hours long, but a solid 20-30 minutes to get it to a real feature length could have focused on people like Tony to bulk that up so that his decision makes sense in that ironically character-based sort of way.

That being said, the second half of the film is a mysterious reveal that is actually quite fun. It's easy to see why the critical reception at the time would have been positive, because the whole thing ends up being recast in a fun (if actually kind of pretty dark) sort of way. It's almost Hitchcockian in its mechanics. It was one of three different possibilities I had in my head (not the one I focused on most, though, to my eternal shame), but it worked.

So, its awkwardness of early sound and its abbreviated runtime hinder it a good bit, but the actual story with its little twists works decently well. It has some very nice compositions like when Peter goes to a gun store to buy Tony a wedding gift, Powell frames her nicely with a gun rack in the foreground and the storekeeper framed just as nicely in a tighter visual spot. It's a mix, but it's very far from the worst start.