Under Pressure
Cast & Crew
Raoul Walsh
Edmund Lowe
Victor Mclaglen
Florence Rice
Marjorie Rambeau
Charles Bickford
Film Details
Technical Specs
Synopsis
While Jumbo Smith leads his "sand hogs," or tunnel builders, digging under the East River in New York City from the Brooklyn side for a subway route, his rival, Nipper Moran, leads his men from the Manhattan side. When a worker collapses coming up the subway stairs, Pat Dodge, a reporter passing by, sees by the man's badge that he is a "Compressed Air Worker" and takes him in a taxi to an emergency medical lock for medical care. After Jumbo and his iron boss, Shocker Dugan, leave a decompression chamber, they help Pat take the worker to the doctor, who explains that she rescued him just in time. In gratitude, Jumbo and Shocker, both attracted to Pat, take her to a beer hall run by Amelia "Amy" Hardcastle, where the sand hogs congregate. Moran comes in and bets Jumbo $500 and Shocker $200 that he and his men will push them back to Flatbush when they meet in the middle. Pat tries to interest her editor in the competition, but she is fired for neglecting a horse show she was supposed to cover. She then gets a job with a Brooklyn paper and awakens Jumbo and Shocker at Amy's apartment with her first byline, a story about them. To celebrate, they go to the fancy Paradise Club. At the club, Jumbo experiences the "itch," a mild case of compressed air still in his body, and a brutish boxer, Hanley, taunts him. Shocker slugs Hanley, to the applause of onlookers. Later, in the tunnel, when the workers hit a snag, Jumbo orders them to use dynamite. The explosion starts a fire, and when water begins to pour in, Shocker argues with Jumbo to let the men go up. Jumbo remains adamant that they should fight the river back, so Shocker hits him on the head from behind with a bolt and knocks him out. Everyone but one man gets out safely, and when Jumbo recovers, Shocker tells him that a falling piece of timber hit him. Before they are to go out with Pat, Shocker puts "cow-itch" powder in Jumbo's shirt. When Jumbo starts to scratch, Shocker takes him to the doctor, and he is put into a decompression chamber. Shocker then goes alone to see Pat, and he finds her sketching Moran for an article. Jumbo discovers the itch powder and goes fuming to Pat's apartment. When Moran taunts Jumbo, saying that his men no longer know who to take their orders from after Shocker hit him, Shocker admits that he did it. Jumbo challenges him to a fight, but Shocker develops a case of the "staggers," and Jumbo and Moran carry him out. When Shocker recovers, Jumbo hits him and fires him. After a large "blow," a rupture in the tunnel that causes the water to pour in and the compressed air to shoot out, occurs and Jumbo does not come up, Shocker goes to help. Jumbo then comes out of the emergency lock, but when he learns that Shocker is still in the tunnel, he rescues him. He refuses, however, to enter the compression chamber with Shocker. Shortly after this, Jumbo's leg becomes paralyzed. When Shocker proposes that he and Pat leave the city to raise silver foxes, she says she will think about it. Amy talks Jumbo into giving his workers a pep talk to show that he is not disabled. When Moran interrupts and offers to call off the bet, Jumbo indignantly says he wants to double it. Moran then throws a glass of beer in Jumbo's face, and when Jumbo doesn't respond, his men look at him in disgust. Shocker realizes that Jumbo's leg is gone, and he reconciles with Jumbo. With a $5,000 bonus at stake, which Shocker wants to use to fix Jumbo's leg, Shocker leads the men to close the gap with Moran's men. As they are about to break through, Shocker lets Jumbo claw his way to Moran. They fight each other, and Jumbo knocks Moran cold. Outside, Jumbo is cheered as a band plays. As Jumbo, Shocker, Amy and Pat drive off together, Amy wins from Pat a bet of five dollars that the men would head straight for a tunnel.
Director
Raoul Walsh
Cast
Edmund Lowe
Victor Mclaglen
Florence Rice
Marjorie Rambeau
Charles Bickford
Siegfried Rumann
Roger Imhof
George Walsh
Warner Richmond
Jack Wallace
James Donlan
Sailor Vincent
Patrick Moriarity
George Regas
Olin Howland
Melissa Teneyck
Jim Marcus
Russ Clark
Andy White
Nella Walker
Josephine Whittell
Geneva Williams
Joseph De Stefani
Ward Bond
Tammany Young
Ben Hewlett
Al Frazier
Bob Finn
Harry Strang
Stanley Blystone
Harry Stevens
Charles Sullivan
Harry Wilson
Jack Norbeck
Fred Gunther
Todd Woodhouse
Blackie Whiteford
Bill Martin
Mike Strilick
Bob Hall
John Ola
H. Harper
Tom Farrell
Jim Cameron
Sam Baker
Everett Brown
Floyd Shackelford
Gus Robinson
John Lester Johnson
Roland Jones
Jerry Engstrand
Paul Boesch
Bud Rae
Barney O'toole
George Magrill
Al Knight
Johnnie Walker
Jim Thorpe
Paul Schwegler
Harry Post
Bob Norton
Raoul James
Jimmie Dime
Dave Wengren
Vic Reese
Johnny Reese
R. Creelman
Walter Vogler
Eugene Strong
Pat Flaherty
Lillian West
Sam Ash
Frank Mayo
Leonard Kibrick
Betty Farrington
Joe Allen
Chet Bartosch
Crew
Don Anderson
Robert Bischoff
Borden Chase
Lester Cole
Irving Cummings
D. L. Daniels
Louis De Francesco
Eli Dunn
Finley Peter Dunne Jr.
Philip Dunne
Eddie Fitzgerald
W. F. Fitzgerald
Robert T. Kane
Jack Kirkland
William Lambert
George Leverett
Robert Mack
Hal Mohr
Luis Molina
L. W. O'connell
Jack Otterson
Noel Pierce
John Smith
Robert Surtees
Billie Wilder
Saul Wurtzel
Howard I. Young
Joe Zaslove
Film Details
Technical Specs
Quotes
Trivia
Notes
The working titles of this film were Bed-Rock, Man Lock and East River. Fox purchased the novel before it was published, when it was entitled Sand Hog. It subsequently appeared in serial form in Argosy, 6 October-November 3, 1934 under the title of East River. According to information in the Twentieth Century-Fox Records of the Legal Department at the UCLA Theater Arts Library, J. Robert Bren and Norman Houston wrote and submitted to Fox a story on speculation expressly for Victor McLaglen and Edmund Lowe in which the climax dealt with the troubles and conflicts of two tunnel workers; however, the studio determined that the Bren and Houston story bore no similarity to the one used for the film, and thus refused to compensate them for it. On August 25, 1934, the Gaelic American, a newspaper called the "Irishman's Bible" by author Frank G. Fowler, who wrote under the name of Borden Chase, published an editorial warning that the film should be protested if a reported demeaning portrayal of an Irish wake was included in the film. George Wasson, of Fox's legal department, responded with a letter instructing the filmmakers that "Every endeavor should be made to see that there are no objectionable scenes from the standpoint of Irish or Irish-American groups." Fowler, who worked for ten years in river tunnels, responded by pointing out that there was no scene of an Irish wake in the script and that it did not show the Irish in an unfavorable light. He further stated that some shots were made in New York with the complete cooperation of the president of the "sandhogs'" union, 55% of which was Irish.
According to news items, after the original shooting was completed in mid-October 1934, James Tinling was selected to direct new scenes and major revisions instead of Raoul Walsh, who directed the original scenes. It was subsequently announced that Tinling would not direct the film and that a number of other directors were looking at the footage shot. Irving Cummings eventually was selected to direct the reshoot, which lasted for most of the month of December 1934. According to a Daily Variety news item in November 1934, $400,000 had already been spent on the production, and the reshoot was expected to cost another $200,000. At the time, a new treatment was being rewritten for the film. Grace Bradley, who appeared as "Pat" in the footage shot by Walsh, was replaced by Florence Rice for the reshoot. According to the legal records, Guinn Williams was originally signed to play "Nipper Moran." Williams is listed in early production charts, as is Ruth Peterson; while Williams was replaced by Charles Bickford, it is not known if Ruth Peterson was in the final film. Jack Donohue was the dance director for the original shooting, but it is not known if any of his work survived in the final film. The song "I'll Go to Flannigan," lyrics by Jack Yellen, music by Dan Dougherty, was written for the film, but was not in the final film. According to an unidentified article dated November 30, 1934 in the AMPAS file for the film, a huge tube, nearly 500 feet long and seventeen feet in diameter, an exact replica of a vehicle tunnel during construction, was copied as a set from the Fulton Street tunnel in New York, which connects Brooklyn and Manhattan.
