The Leathernecks Have Landed (1936) is messy, loud, and surprisingly fun

If you love fast, cheap 1930s B-movies with lots of punching and shouting, The Leathernecks Have Landed is absolutely worth an hour of your time today. If you cannot stand old-school military propaganda or white actors in very bad makeup playing Chinese bandits, you should probably skip this one. 🤷

It is a weird little movie, mostly because of Lew Ayres. He plays Nick Haynes, a Marine with a massive temper who keeps getting into fights and eventually gets kicked out of the service.

Ayres is usually so gentle in his movies, like in We're Rich Again. Here, he is trying so hard to be a tough guy, and it is honestly kind of adorable.

The Good Stuff

The first half of the movie moves like a bullet. Nick gets kicked out, gets depressed, and immediately gets hired by some sketchy guys to smuggle guns into China.

The fistfights are actually pretty great. They look messy and real, not like the heavily choreographed dances you see in later films.

• There is a saloon brawl early on where a guy gets thrown through a window, and you can tell the stuntman really felt that one.
• Ward Bond shows up for about five minutes just to look huge and angry, which is always a win in my book.
• The pacing is so fast you do not have time to think about how silly the plot is.

The Weird and the Bad

Once the movie shifts to China, things get incredibly awkward. The casting is just... wild.

J. Carrol Naish plays a character named "Saloocom" and it is just painful to watch him squint and try to speak in a thick accent. They did not even try to make the sets look like China; it looks like a dusty backlot in California with a few paper lanterns hung up.

There is this one scene where Nick is talking to his love interest, played by Isabel Jewell. The camera stays on her face for so long during his speech that she looks like she forgot her next line and is just praying for the director to yell cut. 🎥

And then, of course, Nick has his sudden change of heart. His old Marine buddies show up to fight the bandits, and suddenly Nick remembers he loves the flag and starts shooting his new business partners.

It is not a masterpiece by any means. But if you want something short, loud, and incredibly goofy to watch on a lazy Sunday, this does the job perfectly.