MAN TO MAN
IMDB
Título original: Man to Man
Título del estreno en España: Herencia de sangre
Director: Allan Dwan
Año: 1930
País: USA
Guión: Joseph Jackson, Ben Ames Williams
Producción: First National Pictures
Intérpretes: Phillips Holmes, Grant Mitchell, Lucille Powers, Otis Harlan, Dwight Frye
Duración: 69 min.
Argumento: Un hijo que se avergüenza de su padre porque éste cometió un crimen, pero que no puede arrancar de su alma los lazos de amor filial que le unen con quien le dio el ser. Y un padre que negado por su hijo no puede ahogar el sentimiento paterno que le lleva a solidarizarse con él en la desgracia. "Hombre para hombre", "Tal para cual", "De tal palo, tal astilla", "De tales padres, tales hijos, por obra del Espíritu Santo", que dicen por tierras de Andalucía. Los dos hombres que han querido sacrificarse calladamente, uno por el otro, acaban comprendiéndose y perdonándose.
Datos Técnicos:
Spoiler:
1930 Man To Man (Allan Dwan) Phillips Holmes,Lucille Powers.avi [968.71 Mb] 
http://worldscinema.org/2012/04/allan-d ... -man-1930/
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Man to Man (1930) is about a small-town young man who is ashamed of his ex-convict father. Man to Man suffers from a lack of story and incident. Mainly, it is an hour or so of the young hero suffering shame and social embarrassment - often fairly unnecessarily. Peter Bogdanovich condemned the film, describing it as "static": which seems fair. However, Man to Man contains a number of Dwan's favorite subjects and staging techniques, which help give it interest.
Man to Man contains Dwan subjects:
• The hero wants to leave his small town and move elsewhere.
• The hero is falsely accused.
• The hero suffers ostracism. However, unlike other Dwan films, the ostracism comes not from false accusations the hero suffers, but from true revelations about his father being a convict.
• The hero runs for class president in a school election. These are not quite the government political parties often found in Dwan.
• The fraternity house is a multi-unit dwelling with many different people residing.
• The family relationships are of many Dwan types: fathers and sons, brothers, and the heroine's mother of grown children.
Financial Processes
The hero, heroine and other characters work in the local bank. In the film's second half, the bank teller hero suddenly becomes short in his accounts. The film slowly demonstrates all the consequences of this, showing various people's detailed investigations. Man to Manbecomes an in-depth look at a financial process.
Financial processes are a favorite subject for Dwan. The one in Man to Man is a bit different from the processes in many other Dwan films, however. Often, Dwan will show how some process affects society and the public: for instance, the circulation of money in The Inside Story. By contrast, the teller's shortage in Man to Man affects only the people at the bank, not society as a whole.
Dwan like images of men in cages, like animals. The hero's bank teller area is a giant cage. Dwan had previously shown Douglas Fairbanks as a bank teller in a cage in He Comes Up Smiling. The teller area in Man to Man is more emphatically cage-like than many banks in other directors' films.
A Working Woman
The heroine works as a secretary at the local bank. She is one of Dwan's sympathetic working women. She often seems more intelligent and sensible than the hero, in coping with the events of the story.
The heroine is loyal to the hero. She also urges him to stand up for his father, and to defy public opinion.
She is implicitly contrasted with the hero's first girlfriend at college. This woman likes the hero when he is a Big Man on Campus. But she is immediately done with him, as soon as the troubles in his family background are revealed. The two women anticipate a bit the hero's two girlfriends in Suez.:
• The college girl is a well-to-do upper class woman presumably, because she is attending college. And she betrays the hero, being only interested in pursuing status. This anticipates Loretta Young in Suez. The college girlfriend is not the sort of full-scale villainess that Loretta Young will play in Suez, however.
• The heroine is a woman from a less prosperous class in society, working in a bank. And she is deeply loyal and supportive of the hero through all of his troubles and social ostracism. This anticipates Annabella in Suez.
Sports Contests
Sports contests and public competitions are a favorite Dwan subject. Man to Man opens with an entertaining college "high hurdle" track meet. It is hard to tell if this is stock footage, with close-up shots of the hero cut in, or whether the whole track meet was staged for the film.
An odd aspect: the hero's shirt has the letter K, with three numbers below it. This is an unusual marking on an athletic outfit. The hero holds his arm over it at one point, making it hard to see, and otherwise is often shot from the side, concealing the lettering.
Later, there is a far more informal contest at the town party, with the hero and another man throwing stones at a hanging can. This picnic is the sort of old-fashioned civic celebration, that anticipates a bit the setting for the tug-o-war in Calendar Girl.
Both contests offer pleasantly upbeat moments, which contrast with the grim tone of much of Man to Man.
In a few Dwan films such as Suez, a hero loses a sporting contest, when he is distracted by the presence of his girlfriend. Man to Man is just the opposite. At both contests, a heroine is present, and the hero notices her. But she seems to be successfully encouraging him on to victory, rather than serving as some kind of distraction.
Construction, Sand and Engineering
Dwan films often have engineering and construction aspects. However, these are less prominent in Man to Man. A few aspects can be read as construction:
• The opening hurdle track can perhaps be seen as an outdoor construction area. It is full of dozens of geometrically arranged hurdles. And over to one side, there is a wooden platform.
• The father is seen hoeing the earth in an large outdoor planter, in his front yard. This is perhaps a simple example of the sand works sometimes seen in Dwan. The hero of Dwan's It's Always Sunday will be planting flowers.
SPOILER. The device used in the thefts is one of Dwan's engineered objects. However, it is "lower tech" than some of the more sophisticated hight tech objects in other Dwan films.
Multi-Story Sets
Dwan likes multi-story sets, but they are not prominent in Man to Man. And there are no Douglas Fairbanks style scenes of the hero climbing such sets.
Two indoors areas feature staircases with upper landings: the fraternity house, and later, the uncle's house. Dwan duly has scenes in which his hero ascends these stairs. The big revelation about his father is staged on the fraternity house staircase.
There are also porch steps at the heroine's house.
Food
Dwan films often show the enjoyment of food. Man to Man is a bit the opposite: we see stress preventing the hero from being able to eat.
Blacks
Man to Man is set in a small town in Kentucky. There is a "Southern atmosphere". A big part of this are the numerous black characters who work in the town.
This portrait has both limitations and strengths. A negative: the way the black people are subservient to the whites. And the way they always seem happy in all these social arrangements.
On the positive side, the black characters are depicted without the stereotypes so often associated with Hollywood films of the era. The African-American characters are honest, hard working, and good at their jobs. They speak with an accent, but they speak coherent, logical English. They understand the world around them logically. They make a huge contrast with the racist stereotypes played in other films by Stepin Fetchit, a man depicted as stupid and lazy. Fetchit constantly mumbled incoherently, implying he was too stupid to speak clearly. By contrast, the blacks in Man to Man talk intelligibly.
When the father returns to town, a long take shows him being welcomed by many men, who shake his hand in turn. Most of these men are white. But one of them is the film's main black character Bildad. This puts the black man on a position of social equality with the white characters in the film. It is only temporary, unfortunately: later scenes will have him in subordinate roles.
The subservience to whites is certainly nothing to be pleased with, and Man to Man can hardly be cited as any sort of ideal treatment of race. Still, the avoidance of negative stereotypes should be noted and commended.
Unusual Filming
Some Dwan films have scenes using unusual or off-trail filmmaking or staging. There are two notable scenes in Man to Man:
• The end of the track meet turns into a movie of the event. The size of the screen-within-the-film then begins shrinking. This is complex and striking.
• The hero has a mental vision of his father talking. The vision is staged as a reflection in the water.
Camera Movement
Dwan likes moving camera shots in people's front lawns or gardens. Man to Man introduces the heroine's house, by a moving camera shot following the hero and heroine down the sidewalk in front of her front garden.
Later scenes are staged on the heroine's front porch.
Some camera movements are shot alongside the pond, where the town holds the party. This area "in front of the pond" is not someone's front yard. But it has a bit of the same feel, a vegetation-filled area in front of a large barrier (such as a house for a pond) through which the characters move.
Dwan likes camera movements showing people walking down streets. Several of these are prominent in Man to Man. The first walk to the bank is an example.
A complexly staged movement: the father at the train station. People keep entering the frame to shake his hand.
The father's first drive through the town is also a good camera movement.
Staging Through Architecture
In the film's second half, one sees out through windows and glass doors of the bank and barbershop, to the street outside. The bank and barber's are across the street from each other.
A few shots represent looking down from upstairs windows:
• An overhead view of the hero's girlfriend in her car. This represents the hero's view from an upstairs bedroom window at his fraternity house.
• An overhead view of the father working in his front yard, seen from inside the house.
In neither case, do we see the window framing this overhead view.
The shot from the train window also avoids the window frame. First we see shots actually through the train window. Then a cut takes us to a moving camera shot without the train window as frame - and this second shot shows the couple parked in the car.
In the previous scene, we had seen the train in back of the car. The train and car form a pair seen from each others Point of View, just as the bank and barbershop will be later in the film.
A brief scene in the bank vault, has a deep view through the vault door of the bank.
Costumes
Costume designer Earl Luick shows his flair for men's clothes. Luick has the hero and other young men in an endless series of good suits. He also provides the hero and his fraternity brothers with an idealized array of sweaters and well-creased trousers, that is a definitive look at college sportswear. This is an idealized image of what nice young pretty boys wore in 1930. Even the POV shot of the town's young men seeing the father at the train station, shows the young men fairly dressed up, although not in such good suits as the hero.
The suits and sweaters, however, do not seem directly related to Dwan traditions.
The father (Grant Williams) is one of many Dwan characters in bow ties.
Saludos
