Tycoon (1947)
John Wayne is Johnny Munroe, an engineer trying to build a railroad tunnel through a mountain in South America. Things get complicated when he falls for the boss's daughter, played by Laraine Day. When he marries her he finds himself fighting both the mountain and Cedric Hardwicke as Day’s father, who’s determined to break him.
This is the kind of potboiler that Hollywood produced to a set recipe; a couple of appealing stars, a little action and plenty of romance, all mixed together by a prolific but uninspired director. It was an expensive film to make and yet, save for the model work and the fact it was shot in colour, it doesn’t look it. With the exception of the exterior of the tunnel, the other locations in the film are only as exotic as the studio back lot. To make matters worse, the sets look like sets; no one was going to win an Oscar for the production design on this film, that’s for sure.
As Munroe, Wayne isn’t called upon to do much acting. There’s no deep character study here, no delving into what makes this man tick. It’s a performance that requires smiles, scowls, and the patented Wayne quizzical look, along with lots of movie star charisma.
Equally underdeveloped is Laraine Day’s Maura; all she has to do is look beautiful while wearing a succession of designer outfits (I’m sure she never wore the same one twice) and it’s a task she’s more than capable of.
Anthony Quinn has a small role as Hardwicke’s nephew and Wayne regular Paul Fix is on hand as an explosives expert but neither has the opportunity to make any impact on the film.
Sometimes putting actors with very different acting styles together pays off (just look at Sleuth with Olivier and Caine), at others it fails miserably. This falls into the latter category, with Wayne's natural style at odds with the more mannered performance of Cedric Hardwicke. Only one can come out the winner and it isn’t Cedric, who appears stiff while at the same time over the top, resulting in many of his scenes being unintentionally funny.
He’s not helped by some shockingly bad dialogue. That the script was written by the great Borden Chase comes as something of a surprise. Chase wrote Red River as well as many of the classic James Stewart/Anthony Mann westerns and it’s shocking to see his name on something as badly written as this; one can only assume he was hampered by the source novel.
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