Two Against the World (1936) review - Angry, clunky 30s drama

If you love vintage melodrama and want to see Humphrey Bogart before he became Humphrey Bogart, this is worth an hour of your life. It is not for anyone expecting a slick gangster flick or a cozy romance. 📻

The whole thing is basically an angry rant against trashy media, but with 1930s microphones.

Bogart plays Sherry Scott, a radio station manager who has to do the dirty work for his greedy boss. The boss wants to boost ratings by broadcasting a trashy dramatization of a twenty-year-old murder.

The problem is, the woman involved has rebuilt her life. This broadcast is going to absolutely ruin everything for her and her daughter.

It is actually a remake of an old newspaper movie, but they just swapped the printing presses for radio towers. Sometimes the transition feels a bit clunky.

For instance, people stand around huge microphones looking incredibly stiff. It is like they are afraid the tech might explode if they move too fast.

There is this one scene where a guy is doing the live sound effects for the radio show, hitting a sheet of metal to make thunder. He looks so bored, like he would rather be doing literally anything else. ⚡

I found myself staring at that guy more than the main actors. It is those tiny, accidental details that make these old studio movies so fun to watch.

Bogart is good here, but you can tell he is still figuring out his screen presence. He does this weird thing with his hands where he keeps stuffing them into his pockets and then pulling them out again.

He is not quite the cool guy from the classics yet. He just looks stressed and a bit sweaty.

The movie gets incredibly dark in the second half. Like, surprisingly bleak for a 1930s film.

It reminds me a bit of the heavy drama in The Other Woman, though this one has much more shouting.

The actress playing the tormented mother, Helen MacKellar, goes all in on the tragedy. Her face in the telephone booth scene is genuinely devastating.

She looks so small and trapped.

But then the movie cuts back to the radio station, and the tonal whip-lash is real. It is hard to stay completely sad when the next shot is some guy in a suit talking about "the airwaves" like he is a wizard.

There is also a weird sub-plot with a secretary that goes absolutely nowhere. She just sort of hovers around looking pretty and then disappears from the plot.

If you want something light and silly like Hot Dogs, stay far away from this one. This is a tragedy about how gossip ruins lives, plain and simple.

The ending is incredibly sudden. The curtains just drop and you are left sitting there wondering if they ran out of script. 🎬

It is not a masterpiece, but it has this raw, clunky energy that I kind of loved. Plus, seeing Bogart before the world knew he was a legend is always worth it.