Torrid Zone (1940)

TORRID ZONE  (1940)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: William Keighley
    James Cagney, Ann Sheridan, Pat O'Brien,
    Andy Devine, Helen Vinson, Jerome Cowan,
    George Tobias, George Reeves, Grady Sutton
Cagney and O'Brien play fast-talking Yanks who butt heads running a banana plantation. Sheridan plays a nightclub chanteuse who incurs O'Brien's wrath by (apparently) daring to exist. She still gets all the movie's best lines. A pulp exercise in economic colonialism in which money equals power and the indigenous rebel leader fighting to get his stolen land back is the villain of the piece. It ends without resolving much of anything. Cagney never makes it to that job in Chicago. O'Brien's still a bullying asshole. Sheridan's dreams are up in he air as much as ever. The rebel leader has escaped for the third or fourth time. And the two hustling Americanos are still going at it, cracking the whip, barking out orders and pushing people around.