The Iron Major

Iron Major, The (1943)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

By the numbers bio pic from RKO features Pat O'Brien in the role of William 'Frank' Cavanaugh, a top football coach who gave up his career to enter WWI where he became a hero. After the war he went back to coaching where he ended up having one of the best winning percentages in football history. There are some nice things about this bio pic but in the end there's just too many familiar items to make it a complete winner. You can also clearly see that RKO didn't have too much money to spend because there's way too much stock footage from either earlier silent movies or just newsreels. This is an extremely big problem when we're watching one of the footballs games and we're suppose to be caught up in what's going on but we're just seeing stock footage with cutaways to O'Brien sitting on the sideline. This certainly takes one out of the action and this also happens during the war scenes. Some of the war scenes contain actual footage and these moments are among the best in the film as O'Brien does a very good job at motivating his men before going into battle. These speeches are also very well handled by the actor in terms of the football talk as he easily films the coach role as he did earlier in COLLEGE COACH and of course KNUTE ROCKNE, ALL American. He's fine in the role as is Ruth Warrick and Robert Ryan in their supporting roles. The film moves along at a pretty good speed but one can't help but feel there's no real direction going on as the film is all over the place in what it's trying to do. At one point it wants to be a football film. The next minutes a complete bio of the man. The next minute it's hyping up the patriotic tone, which is understandable considering what was going on when the movie was originally released. None of the three things really come together and in the end we're left with a movie that offers nothing new to the genre.