Blast from the Past
Fast Workers (1933)
In the aftermath of the commercial failure of his 1932 Freaks, Browning was assigned to produce and direct (uncredited) an adaption of John McDermott’s play Rivets.
The script for Fast Workers by Karl Brown and Laurence Stallings dramatizes the mutual infidelities, often humorous, that plague a ménage à trois.
It comprises a high-rise construction worker and seducer Gunner Smith (John Gilbert), his co-worker and sidekick, Bucker Reilly (Robert Armstrong) and Mary (Mae Clarke), an attractive “Gold digger” seeking financial and emotional stability during the Great Depression.
Browning brings to bear all the thematic modes that typically motivate his characters.
Rosenthal writes: In Fast Workers the four varieties of frustration are so well integrated among themselves that it is difficult, if not impossible to say where one ends and another begins. These interrelations make it one of the most perplexing of Browning’s films, especially with regard to morality and justice.
The betrayals, humiliations and retaliations that plague the characters, and the moral legitimacy of their behaviors remains unresolved.
Rosenthal comments on the ambivalence: “Fast Workers is Browning’s final cynical word on the impossibility of an individual obtaining justice, however righteous his cause, without critically sullying himself. Superficially, things have been set right. Gunner and Bucker are again friends and, together are equal to any wily female. Yet Gunner, the individual who is the most culpable, finds himself in the most secure position, while the basically well-intentioned Mary is rejected and condemned by both men.”
An example of Browning’s ability to visually convey terror—a technique developed in the silent era—is demonstrated when Mary perceives that Bucker, cuckolded by Gunner, reveals his homicidal rage.
MGM committed $525,000 to the production budget, high sum for relatively short feature.
The studio reported earnings of only $165,000 on the film after its release, resulting in loss of $360,000.
