glen boles

Continuing on my tour of cheapo Chesterfield studio movies, welcome to today’s QUICK REVIEW on THE QUITTER, an extremely low-budget drama that is made special with some amazingly relevant and powerful messages and lessons sorely lacking in today’s “entertainment”.
The plot has Emma Dunn as widowed mother to a slick business minded college grad William Bakewell, and a tortured, wildhaired, rumpleclothed emo high school grad, Glen Boles, whose look and demeanor predates James Dean by a good twenty years. We learn that the father never came back from WWI, and ma took over the small town newspaper, singlehandedly keeping it enough of a moneymaker for the past 12 years that she never missed an issue or a payroll, and could afford to raise two sons in a huge mansion with servants, and put one son through college. Mom’s a real self-made success, through careful budgeting, responsibility, personal sacrifice, hard work and respect for the local readers and advertisers. All these years she’s been laying the groundwork for older son Bakewell to step in and run the paper. With that setup, things start to roll, and soon the long lost father thought dead comes back to town. He stays with an old family friend and printing press operator, and while remaining a stranger, he helps advise his troubled son Boles and shows him the stupidity and inevitable emptiness of being a hotheaded drifter and cowardly  ”quitter” in life.

william bakewell

That’s interesting enough, but the more surprising plot development unfolds as college-polished son Bakewell becomes an overly ambitious status-hungry know-it-all who expresses a long held distaste for his mother’s small town values and approach to the paper, i.e, knowing her audience and catering to their reading preferences. Bakewell condescendingly declares he’s going to waltz right in to the top position, despite having zero experience actually getting his hands inky by working at the paper, and announces he’ll make it a “modern” daily with a hifalutin elitist viewpoint. He’s also courting a ritzy woman and shamefully covers up his working class background to impress her family. Predictably, he quickly alienates all the readers and advertisers, overspends and generally lords his entitlement attitude around town, poo poohing as yokels all those who are too stupid too understand his highly edu-ma-cated political editorial approach. Too arrogant to listen to the advice of those more experienced, too proud to change, too haughty to admit failure and step down or start over, he grows more entrenched instead of adapting to please the readership. He finally goes too far when he puts ma’s mansion up as collateral as he drives the paper into the ground.

barbara weeks

Meanwhile, emo Boles has been shipped to a military academy and comes back the very model of an honorable, respectful, decent and disciplined young man who risks expulsion to give his loser brother what-for, within earshot of Bakewell’s glam fiance. Saying any more would constitute a spoiler, but suffice to say this story, told with no music, no big name actors and hardly any production values to speak of, has the huge advantage of forwarding a great moral and message, namely, that nothing succeeds like hard work, humility and respect for tradition. Bakewell, by turning his back on everything that made his good life possible, manages to throw it all away with his snobbery and narcissism. A nice little element of the story is that the brothers’ girlfriends, one initially looks like a loose floosy (Mary Kornman) and the other’s seemingly a shallow society butterfly (Barbara Weeks), both turn out to have (say it with me) hearts of gold and loads of substance, and each get their respective chances to prove themselves.

mary kornman

Mary Kornman was a child star who gained fame in the OUR GANG movies, and worked well into adulthood; there is a site dedicated to her at http://www.marykornman.com/ where you can read a long biography and whence this photo cometh.  Barbara Weeks was a promising Ziegfeld girl turned actress who so suddenly disappeared from Hollywood that her obit ran in Variety in 1954, nearly 50 years before she actually died. She married a Lockheed pilot and retired from acting. An interesting obit ran in the UK Telegraph in 2003. more on Weeks here and at writer Michael Ankerich’s site

William Bakewell was a veteran both of acting and of the U.S. Army, a founding member of the screen actors guild and probably best remembered for playing the amputee Albert in ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT, even though he worked steadily in movies and TV well into the 1970s.

Finally, here’s a very interesting oral history project interview with Glen Boles relating to his Coast Guard service, but also briefly outlining his movie career. When asked what he wants to have recorded for posterity he chose to stress a sentiment that relates to the theme of THE QUITTER, hard work and humility:

“ in today’s world the parents are so affluent, like your own kids, that they give them everything and there’s nothing that they have to work for. And I think that when you are treated that way you are missing building blocks in your Psyche; in your inner most being, so you can’t deal with problems in a realistic way”

Read more about THE QUITTER at IMDB