The tail end of 2024 saw me finally starting to dig into Edward G. Robinson's filmography, with his two collaborations with Joan Bennett and Fritz Lang setting a very high standard, something that continued into the first week of this new year when I viewed Kid Galahad. Robinson's body of work is a fascinating mix, as was the man himself, investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee after actor Adolphe Menjou dropped his name, he spent some time on the "Gray List", and had a couple of years where work was harder to come by. His career-changing moment had came in 1930 when Robinson took the role of Caesar "Rico" Bandello in Mervyn Le Roy's Pre-Code mobster classic, Little Caesar, and for a few years it was hard for Robinson to shake off the mobster typecasting that would inevitably follow. Despite a long and distinguished career, Robinson was never nominated for an Academy Award, passing away in January of 1973 from bladder cancer, just a month before the Academy awarded him an Honorary Award for his body of work. Destroyer is another of those WWII propaganda films that focuses on the patriotic Steve "Boley" Boleslavski (Edward G. Robinson), a former US Navy sailor working in a shipyard on the Pacific coast building the Destroyer, John Paul Jones. Boley had served on the previous ship with the same name during WWI, and is anxious to re-enlist and serve on this new Destroyer, especially when he meets a former officer who has been given the command. Robinson's Boley has a beautiful daughter, Mary, played by Marguerite Chapman, and she'll play a significant part in a subplot between Boley and his rival for the position of Chief Bosun's Mate, Glenn Ford's Mickey Donohue, with the usual shenanigans of a doting father protecting his daughter. That's the subplot here, the main attraction is the battle to make the ship a useful weapon during the war, something that proves difficult as fault after fault makes her, and Boley, a laughing stock due to his constant assertion that she's a "great lady". His brand of leadership is also confrontational, and when he's demoted in favour of Mickey after a series of mistakes and issues with the crew, the conflict between them just intensifies. With the ship badly damaged during action, the crew believe that the ship is jinxed and are all looking for a transfer, and it'll be a stirring story of the original John Paul Jones and his exploits during the American Revolutionary War that'll boost morale. Boley's heroics will save the day, almost living up to those propaganda words of the poster to your left. Unfortunately director William A. Seiter's film is a bit of a lacklustre affair, Robinson's character is rather annoying, and the action sequences look like a mixture of models and cheap Columbia Pictures stock footage. Even at just 99 minutes long, this feels like it has padding, and although there's the odd decent scene, with Ford playing his part well, but it could have done with more humour and more of the Ford/Chapman romance. Addition support comes from the likes of Edgar Buchanan, Regis Toomey, and an uncredited blink and you'd miss him Lloyd Bridges cameo. Not one of Robinson's finest, or Ford's for that matter, and I won't be rushing out to find any more of Seiter's films either, this was just sort of meh?
