Cinema: Tugboat Annie

(See front cover)

Cinemas in which Marie Dressier plays the lead have one quality in common—the heroine is a raffish, vigorous old woman whose generous heart thumps under sleazy clothes that do not fit her. Tugboat Annie (MGM) is not merely a typical Marie Dressier picture; it crowns all her previous works because its heroine is even more raffish, kindly, troubled, brave and energetic than the heroines of Min and Bill, Emma, Politics or Prosperity. She is Annie Brennan, whose three excitements are her mischievously drunken husband Terry (Wallace Beery), her handsome, respectable son Alec (Robert Young) and her dilapidated tugboat, the Narcissus.

Life on the Narcissus is complicated principally by Terry's appetite for whiskey. He cuts off pieces of the hawser and pawns them for liquor so that when Annie sets out to tow a schooner into port she is humiliated by finding that she has no rope. Young Alec, disgusted by his father's dipsomania, goes to work for a steamship company, manages to satisfy his mother's ambition by becoming captain of the company's sleekest passenger ship, the Glacier Queen. The day Alec completes his first voyage, Terry gets drunk on hair-tonic. Annie locks him up in the cabin while she goes to a reception for her son, meets his fiancee Pat (Maureen O'Sullivan), daughter of his boss.

The next three reels of Tugboat Annie show a few more of the things Annie has to put up with. At a reception on board the Glacier Queen, Annie snatches so many glasses of punch away from her husband that she gets tipsy herself. Alec persuades his employer to give Terry a job. Terry gets drunk, makes embarrassing remarks about Alec's fondness for the employer's daughter. Finally one day when Annie is ashore trying to borrow money for new boilers, Terry takes the Narcissus for a spin in the harbor, rams a ferry boat while turning around to pick up a floating case of whiskey. The Narcissus has to be sold to pay the damages. Annie—by this time estranged from her son because she will not desert her inconvenient husband —is hired to stay on as captain.

Having presented the principal figures as slapstick personages, the picture finally tries to deal with them more solemnly. One stormy night when Annie is towing a load of garbage out to sea, she comes on the Glacier Queen, her shaft broken, foundering near a reef. This time Terry behaves like a hero. He crawls into the fire box of the Narcissus to repair the boiler so that the tug can pull the Glacier Queen out of danger. The film ends with Terry recovering from his burns and wear ing a medal. The steamship company has bought back the Narcissus for Annie and she is reconciled with her son.

Tugboat Annie is likely to become financially one of the most successful pictures of the year not because of its plot. which was rewritten by Zelda Sears and Eve Greene from Norman Reilly Raine's