Steineded
How sad is this?
Moustroll
Good movie but grossly overrated
Glimmerubro
It is not deep, but it is fun to watch. It does have a bit more of an edge to it than other similar films.
alexanderdavies-99382
"Torrid Zone" was the final film with real life friends, James Cagney and Pat O' Brien. They made several memorable films together for the studio, "Angels With Dirty Faces" being the best. The above is a light-hearted and amusing film about the various struggles on a Mexican plantation. The script is fairly standard but the cast really a lot to the screenplay by giving good performances and demonstrating a flair for light comedy. Ann Sheridan is a very good leading lady for James Cagney. She plays a card shark and nightclub singer who is on the run. They and O' Brien play off each other to amusing effect. The gunfight scenes add a bit to the proceedings as well.Released in 1940, "Torrid Zone" probably did respectable business at the box office.
JohnHowardReid
A surprisingly entertaining Warner Bros venture into pure escapism, with some of the most crackling and sizzlingly witty dialogue ever heard on the classic screen. Keighley puts it all across with a terrific punch, with the assistance of Wong Howe's superlative camera-work. From the long opening shot with its sweeping photography, we just know we're in for a real treat. Keighley doesn't let us down. In fact, he maintains the torrid pace with only a few breaks. The players are both well cast and brilliantly matched. Cagney and Sheridan make a great team, whilst that uneven actor, Pat O'Brien, is here at his persuasive best. O'Brien makes such a forceful impression that we miss him when he's off the screen for a long stretch in the middle of the movie. We also enjoyed Frank Puglia in another of his typically amusing studies, this time of a harassed police chief. Maybe Tobias is a bit too heavy as the revolutionary, but wait till you catch George Reeves partnering Victor Kilian as a couple of below-the- border stereotypes. Aside from the ambush which is just a little too realistically staged to jibe with the jovial mood of the rest of the action, atmosphere is winningly captured. Production values are lavish. As far as most audiences are concerned, Torrid Zone is marvelous fun because of its three principals. Cagney, Sheridan and O'Brien make the most of their endlessly witty comebacks. Their delivery is fast, their charisma catching, their style impeccable.
Neil Doyle
Life at a banana plantation must have its compensations, judging from the way things turn out in this fast-moving, wise-cracking comedy directed stylishly by William Keighley. PAT O'BRIEN is the hard-nosed manager of a plantation who needs his former overseer's help in keeping some criminal elements from causing too much trouble. So JAMES CAGNEY comes back to help him--but trouble brews when he and O'Brien quarrel over red-headed ANN SHERIDAN, who just about walks off with the film's best lines.It's strictly a Warner comedy-melodrama with stock players turning up in some good supporting roles, particularly GEORGE TOBIAS, ANDY DEVINE, JEROME COWAN and, in a small role, GEORGE (Superman) REEVES.The real surprise of the film is ANN SHERIDAN, handling herself in every situation as a gal to be reckoned with. It's fun all the way.
bmacv
A couple of buddies chasing a buck, and usually a woman, in what we now call the Third World was a staple plot-line of movies from the 1930s on. Such movies were thought to offer a sure-fire recipe for entertainment: a travelogue to sultry and dangerous corners of the globe; romance sauced up with sass; exotic peril; and good ol' man-to-man rivalry.
Torrid Zone, directed by the pedestrian William Keighley, follows the recipe but lacks something in the execution – that elusive something that elevates the routine into the memorable. Down in Central America, Pat O'Brien plays the irascible operative of a banana-exporting concern (read: the infamous United Fruit Company). Besides shipping ripe but not rotten product to New Orleans, he serves as unofficial proconsul in this far-flung province of the American empire, where his word is, literally, law. (This subversive strand of the script, however, never gets explored.)In addition to sluggish delivery from Plantation #7, O'Brien faces other problems. First, a local `revolutionista' condemned to death has escaped to rejoin rebel forces. Second, an American card-shark and shantoozie (Ann Sheridan) is stirring up trouble (O'Brien flubs his attempt to ship her home like a crate of perishable fruit). Third, his old nemesis James Cagney, former overseer of #7, is back in the country. Cagney takes a shine to Sheridan, who has befriended the revolutionary, who wants back the lands confiscated by O'Brien, who....Barbed and topical dialogue, most of it mouthed throatily by Sheridan, proves to be Torrid Zone's chief attraction. But the needling rivalry between O'Brien and Cagney wears a little thin (as it does in the contemporaneous Road pictures between Hope and Crosby). And Keighley doggedly follows the script from one damn thing to another, so the movie ends up a fast-paced clutter. O'Brien, a good actor who never really grew into a star (though he would shine in Crack-Up and Riffraff a few years later), suffers mostly from an unpleasant part. Cagney, in a Latin-lover mustache and the tropical answer to a 10-gallon hat, comes off as a bit of a bantam rooster. But Sheridan (whom Warner's publicists had dubbed the `Oomph' girl) remains a delight, embodying the pluck, warmth and smarts of that generation of game women who survived the Depression and would help to win the coming War.
