AniInterview Sorry, this movie sucks

BelSports This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Rio Hayward All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

Kinley This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

bkoganbing After being told that he hasn't the right stuff for making it on Wall Street, former All American Football player Chester Morris goes in for a different kind of piracy. He decides to become a real pirate and beat the man who told him he was no good on the street Emmet Corrigan at his own game.Which in addition to Wall Street stock manipulations is bootlegging. Corrigan's role is eerily like that of Joseph P. Kennedy. Only this Wall Street pirate and bootlegger has a daughter played by Thelma Todd a rather spoiled young lady used to getting exactly what she wants. Todd's the main problem, she gives a spiritless and perfunctory performance, so atypical of her. She has absolutely no chemistry. As for Morris he gets a bit too self righteous.On the plus side when the hijacking of bootleggers like Fred Kohler gets going Corsair gets a bit of life pumped into it. Frank McHugh plays a part he would repeat over and over at Warner Brothers as the hero's best friend and sets the mold here. Kohler is one nasty customer as the bootlegger Morris robs.Corsair is an interesting, but in some stages rather lifeless film.

calvinnme I wasn't expecting much from this film. I watched it mainly because it stars two favorites of mine - Chester Morris and Thelma Todd. I was very pleasantly surprised. The film opens with John Hawks (Chester Morris), a collegiate football star, winning the big game. Later that night, at a society party, he meets Alison Corning (Thelma Todd) who personifies every argument in favor of the inheritance tax you've ever heard with the saying "spare the rod spoil the child" thrown in for good measure. She's beautiful, spoiled, used to getting whatever and whoever she wishes, and will do anything for a thrill. John's bad luck is that she wants him from first sight. She convinces her big Wall Street financier dad, "Steve" as she calls him, to give John a job at his firm. John is hardly enamored by Alison. He can see right through her, and on the surface that's got to be a pleasant experience for any guy, but then you get to the not-so-gooey middle. This is what repels him.So John takes the job, not really knowing what to do after college anyways, but soon he sees that Alison is the apple that has not fallen far from the tree. Dad is all about making money and he doesn't care if he has to scam orphans and widows to do it. When John refuses to hard sell some worthless stock to an old lady in exchange for her solidly performing bonds he's tossed out without a second glance by dear old Steve.John then decides to take to piracy on the high seas - after all it's not too different from what Alison's dad is doing - except he will steal from crooks not orphans and widows. John sets his sights on one bootlegger in particular, and with the help of a wealthy friend who backs him financially by helping him buy a boat (Frank McHugh as Chub), he starts to regularly hijack gangster "Big John's" haul of bootleg liquor and sell it to Steve, his old employer, who is into bootlegging himself as a sideline.Now the problem here is that John doesn't spread the pain around to various bootleggers - he picks strictly on Big John's boats. He should realize that Big John did not get where he got by dropping out of Sunday school and sooner or later he is going to retaliate. I'll let you watch and see how this all shakes out.I just thought it was very clever and timely for a filmmaker to equate the robber barons of Wall Street with piracy on the high seas. In fact, it makes pirates look noble compared to the Wall Street banksters. There's also some gritty reality thrown in via Mayo Methot's Sophie, the typist for Big John who's beautiful but beaten down by life in the Depression and the constant companionship of ruffians just trying to make a living. Her relationship with Ned Sparks' "Slim" is touching. Slim is one of Big John's men, and the couple is helping out John Hawks in his acts of piracy against Big John in return for a percentage, hoping to get out of "the life" once and for all. The ever present danger of getting caught - if they are lucky, by the law, if not so lucky, by Big John, makes them underplay their emotions for one another and their emotional caution turns out to be quite touching.If you like Chester Morris or Thelma Todd, if you want to see a different kind of gangster film, if you think that many of the people running Goldman Sachs and AIG deserve to be cell mates with Bernie Madoff but will probably never learn their lesson from anybody or anything in this life, give this almost forgotten little film a chance.

csteidler The early moments of Corsair offer a big buildup for our first look at Alison Loyd: we can hear her conversation with dance partner Frank McHugh, but our only view is of the back of her head. A moment later she is introduced to football hero Chester Morris, and again, she speaks unseen….until finally, in close up, her big smile flashes onto the screen. –Of course, it's Thelma Todd's smile. This big introduction apparently aims at establishing Todd as a mysterious and glamorous figure; presumably, this is why Todd is billed as "Alison Loyd" for the first and (I think) only time—to differentiate her "new" persona from the light comic actress Thelma Todd had been (and would continue to be, thank heavens!).Unfortunately, the plot and dialog of Corsair offer Todd/Loyd little else to do besides smile and act alternately spoiled and silly. Her character is a major motivator to the actions of other characters—but she really does little and develops less herself. Which is too bad! Director Roland West didn't do Thelma justice by setting her up as a dangerous female and then giving her practically no depth, surprises or even decent lines to speak.Chester Morris comes off better as a football hero turned banker turned pirate. Fired from his broker job for being unwilling to steal a little old lady's savings, he sets out to prove the boss banker wrong in his assertion that Morris doesn't have the nerve to be successful. Nerve? Morris sets up a booze pirating operation that is daring, dangerous and profitable…and sells the banker liquor by the boatload. The middle section of the movie builds tension around Morris's organization and the danger he faces as his victims—a gang of smugglers themselves—eventually catch on to his operation and hatch plans to capture and wipe him out. Indeed, it turns into a pretty good adventure movie once it gets rolling.Frank McHugh adds liveliness in his role as Morris's right hand man. Fred Kohler is appropriately menacing as "Big John" the smuggler. Morris, a solid lead, gives an excellent performance as a man who chooses and sticks to his own unique code of conduct.The scenes between Morris and Todd ought to be the highlights of a film like this….but it's just the opposite. They speak so slowly…how do you make Chester Morris and Thelma Todd into slow talkers? –It's not just a function of the movie being an early talkie, either; there's a deliberateness to these scenes apparently meant to be serious and dramatic—and instead, all it does is drag. As an adventure, it's not bad. But darn, in the "dramatic" sections, this is a movie in bad need of some zippy dialog.

the_mysteriousx This film is available on Alpha Video in a decent print and is most noteworthy as the final film of Roland West's career. He made three sound films, all with Chester Morris in the lead. This is also the least popular and in some ways the least artistic of the three. An additional behind-the-scenes interest of this film, is that Thelma Todd is the female lead, billed as "Alison Loyd" in an obvious attempt to distinguish her as a dramatic actress. She is fine in the film, but has a rather skimpy part.The plot involves a young man who has just graduated from college who begins to work on Wall Street after being teased by Todd's character and clashes with his boss, who is her father. To prove his point and to get revenge, he becomes a modern day pirate, stealing liquor from illegal shipments at sea. Chester Morris is excellent in the role of John Hawkes, the young man.Some great sharp camera angles and one very dark, sinister scene involving "Fish Face" and a female, Sophie, do not entirely make up for the fact that this film does not advance the techniques of film-making as ALIBI and THE BAT WHISPERS did. West's combination of editing with sound effects and music in ALIBI were a revelation in early 1929. And with THE BAT WHISPERS, he took miniature work to a new level in sound films with his 'bat's eye' camera moves through the cities and towns. CORSAIR seems rather routine in comparison.That is not to say this is not a good little gangster film. Fred Kohler is solid as the bootlegger, Big John, and Ned Sparks along with Mayo Methot are great in support. The editing is crisp and the overall film has the dark touches you would expect from Roland West. It still holds up as one of the more effective gangster films of the early 1930s.