recommended

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

The movie runs out of plot and jokes well before the end of a two-hour running time, long for a light comedy.

Corsair (from 1931) is a real moldie-oldie, that, in spite of its obvious age and creakiness, still manages to be fairly entertaining, in the long run.This 83-year-old Comedy/Romance/Adventure story tells the roundabout tale of how dashing, college, football hero, Johnny Hawkes, meets cheeky, spoilt, heiress, Alison Corning.Before long Hawkes finds himself captain of the Corsair (a sleek, high-speed gunboat).Imminent danger lurks everywhere once Hawkes and his crew begin dealing with ruthless, modern-day pirates involved in big-time liquor smuggling.With its story set mainly in the West Indies, Corsair (at 72 minutes) certainly had its fair share of high-seas action, violence and double-crosses.This fast-paced story starred blond beauty, Thelma Todd (murdered at 29) and early-talkies heart-throb, Chester Morris (suicide at 69).

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.

The film begins with a big college football game. Although the score is tied, in true Hollywood fashion, the game is an upset win the last seconds. The hero of the game, Chester Morris, is invited to a swanky party where he meets the slightly stuck up rich girl, Thelma Todd. However, when she learns he is poor, she is at first uninterested. Then, on a lark, she gets him a job with her unscrupulous father on Wall Street--maybe if Morris is rich and successful, she can still have him for her own.In the meantime, she leaves for Europe and won't return for a year. In the meantime, Morris tries his best but because he's ethical, he just can't bring himself to push junk bonds for his sleazy boss. Now here's where it gets strange, as he's very ethical and can't hurt poor shmoes, when he's fired, he decides to become very, very crooked but instead target rich jerks! His plan is to hijack shipments of high-quality mob liquor that are being held offshore (due to Prohibition).Now that Morris is finally somebody (yeah, a crook), Todd returns from her trip and is immediately taken with him. After all, being rich and powerful seems to be all that Todd cares about in a man! Well, what happens next is something you'll just have to see for yourself.The film does have some decent action scenes, though the plot, at times, is very far-fetched (especially towards the end). For example, once Morris does hijack the booze, he allows the people he just robbed to live--and they would certainly eventually take revenge on him for his villainy--after all, they are mobsters. In addition, he also retires after this one and only holdup--it seems this whole stunt was done to teach his future father-in-law a lesson AND get the girl!(?) Kinda weird, huh--especially when the father-in-law then hires Morris to work for him--even though it turned out that the shipment of booze actually belonged to Todd's father!! Huh?! Because the film kind of made my head hurt at the end (and it should because I made the mistake of thinking), it drops the overall score to 5--a time-passer but not much more.

Ex-football player Chester Morris, egged on by rich girl Thelma Todd, tries bootlegging and piracy as a career. Will he continue to triumph over the villainous gangsters whose cargoes he hijacks, with friends Ned Sparks and Frank McHugh, or will Big John get his revenge on the crew of the CORSAIR? This isn't a great work of art, and no new ground is broken. But once the plot gets rolling (it takes about a reel), this is a darn good action flick with a nice straightforward leading-man performance out of Morris, a surprisingly sympathetic turn out of Ned Sparks, and much of the fluid, frequently beautiful camera work and staging that is characteristic of director Roland West. Mayo Methot probably gets the best acting scene, and, in this case, is helped by her director, who has the sense to let the scene play out with simple lighting and staging. The director, indeed, helps himself by downplaying some of the camera showiness on films like Alibi and The Bat, and by improving, significantly, his direction of actors and his pacing of the story.We do not have a perfect film here. Thelma Todd is around to look pretty, but she had not found her dramatic acting chops at the time this movie was shot. Also, the ending of the movie is utterly wrong and too drawn out. But in its middle reels, this movie is as spry and well-paced as a typical Warners movie, and suggests that Morris could have had a much better movie career with more films like this. Worth seeing -- particularly if you think 1931 movies are all people standing around and declaiming while the camera stays put.