They Gave Him a Gun (1937) review: A wonderfully messy 30s melodrama

If you have ninety minutes to spare tonight and want to see Spencer Tracy looking incredibly young and slightly confused, yes, this is worth your time. Gangster movie fans will probably get a kick out of how fast it moves, but people who want a neat, logical story are going to absolutely hate it. 🍿

It is such a strange, bumpy ride of a movie. One minute we are in the muddy trenches of World War I, and the next we are in a fancy Art Deco apartment watching a guy become a racketeer.

The whole thing starts with Franchot Tone playing Jimmy, this super timid clerk who hates violence. Then the army draft happens, and they give him a rifle.

And boy, does he like it. There is this one shot where Tone is looking at his weapon with this creepy, wide-eyed grin that actually made me shiver a bit. It is like something clicked in his brain that probably shouldn't have.

Then Spencer Tracy shows up as Fred, his tough-guy buddy who teaches him how to shoot. Tracy is always good, but here he feels like he is acting in a completely different movie than everyone else; he is so relaxed, almost like he just wandered onto the set after lunch.

Anyway, Fred gets "killed" (he isn't really, of course) and Jimmy ends up marrying Fred's nurse girlfriend, played by Gladys George. She has this incredibly tired face that works perfectly for a war nurse, though her hair somehow stays perfectly curled through several bomb raids.

When Fred inevitably comes back from the dead, things get unbelievably awkward. Nobody seems to know how to react, so they just kind of stand around in small rooms looking at the floor.

The movie gets noticeably better once Jimmy decides that civilian life is too boring and starts working for the mob. It reminded me a bit of those older, dusty silent shoot-em-ups like Calibre 45, except now everyone has snappy 1930s slang.

There is a scene in a restaurant where Jimmy shows off his new wealth by ordering basically everything on the menu, and the waiter just looks exhausted. I love small, useless details like that.

A few things I wrote down in my notebook:

• The hospital tents look like they were built out of old bedsheets and hope.
• Franchot Tone's mustache deserves its own billing in the credits.
• There is a prison break scene near the end that is so rushed you might miss it if you blink.

The script had a bunch of different writers, including James M. Cain, and you can really feel the tug-of-war happening behind the scenes. Half the movie wants to be a serious anti-war statement, and the other half just wants to show cool gangster shootouts.

It doesn't really work as a cohesive piece of art, but that is exactly why I enjoyed it. It is messy and human and doesn't feel like it was run through a focus group of studio executives. 🎬