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With the transitional remark, "Why, it seems only yesterday . . ." tycoon and satellite become James Whitcomb Riley boys in a swimming hole. Then, "in no time at all he was president of the road," bullying the directors of Chicago & South Western Railway into buying a little road for spite. Then a flashback to his first trackwalking days, his courtship of prim, big-eyed Sally (Colleen Moore). Then a flash forward to his troubles with his spoiled collegian son at whose angry look he says, "Don't look at me that way, boy. You're giving away too much weight" Then a flashback to his self-education when ambitious Sally walked track in his stead, his first promotion, his son's birth. Then another flash forward to middle-age when the divorcee daughter of a rival tycoon saves her father's business life by persuading Garner to fall in love with her. This leads to the price of "the power and the glory": the broken-hearted suicide of Sally with the question, "Why shouldn't you do what you want to once before you die?" This catapults the doomed tycoon on into marriage with the divorcee, into a brutal handling of a bloody strike, into his wife's affair with his son until, finally, full of "power and glory," peeled of self-respect, he dies by his own hand.
Playwright Sturges, no O. Henry, no Conrad, has ordered his parts to diminish the suspense, not to heighten it. With a technic calling for smart treatment, he has used it on the simplest possible problems, the simplest types of characters: the sentimental bully, Spencer Tracy; busy, smug, clean-toothed Colleen Moore; wickedly beauteous Helen Vinson; the caddish son Clifford Jones. Like Producer Lasky, Colleen Moore was making a comeback too, hers after a four-year absence from films. She and Spencer Tracy, their emotions confined largely to work and sorrow, gave performances rated by Manhattan critics as "inspired." Before last week's premiere at Manhattan's Gaiety Theatre Miss Moore primly unveiled a bronze plaque marking the scene of "the first public presentation of ... the first motion picture in which narratage was used as a method of telling a dramatic story."