Quick Millions moves like a getaway car—at speed. Within the first two minutes we meet a lowly truck driver who dreams of becoming a big shot. Within five, he’s committed a crime. Within 10, he’s laying out plans for a protection racket, the first of many schemes which pave his way to the top. Like its lead character, Quick Millions is quick, sharp and knows all the angles.
Daniel Raymond, better known as ‘Bugs’ (Spencer Tracy), drives a truck but has his eye on something better. Stuck in traffic, he looks over at the sleek town car in the next lane and declares he’ll be driven in one someday. When the car’s chauffeur mocks him, Bugs responds by ramming him and attacking the policeman who walks over to inspect the damage. Despite ending up in court and being handed a stiff fine, Bugs is unrepentant. He believes anyone can get rich with a little nerve and soon he’s offering garage owners protection for a mere $75 a week—and guaranteeing them customers by vandalizing any cars unwisely parked outside overnight. The city is filled with wealthy, influential men and Bugs intends to be one of them.
Quick Millions is remarkably unsentimental. Director Rowland Brown, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Courtenay Terrett, moves swiftly and with dark wit. In one scene, the driver of a fuel tanker leans out of his cab to berate Bugs’ henchmen, who are trying to extort him. “You tell Bugs,” he begins, only for the tanker to explode, killing him mid-sentence. The men cheerfully drive off, one of them quipping,”Let’s tell Bugs what he said.” When a construction magnate refuses to do business with him, Bugs retaliates in a brisk montage that bluntly gets the point across: workers are held at gun point, thugs overrun a construction site and a building explodes. His target quickly capitulates. Brown and Terrett’s script (with additional dialogue by John Wray and uncredited work by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur) rejoices in banter and slang. Bugs’ associates include a gangster called Lefty and another called Nails; his girlfriend, the perennially unimpressed Daisy (Sally Eilers), tells Bugs his nickname suits him as well as “a punch in the nose”.
As Bugs sees it, the world is divided into the knowing and the saps and there’s no profit in being a sap. He has an agile mind and his burgeoning wealth is his reward for always being the smartest person in the room. Even his supposed partners are fair game. Bugs attends a dinner Nails (Warner Richmond) gives for mob bosses and their cronies and arranges for his crew to rob them, sweeping up cash, jewellery and all the blackmail material Nails had amassed on several alleged pillars of society. If none of them are wily enough to suspect they’ve been double crossed, that’s their problem. Daisy tries to be the voice of reason: “Oh, Bugs, you’re not smart, you’re just lucky.” “I’m both,” he replies smugly.
In a late bid at being ‘responsible’ entertainment, Quick Millions also suggests men like Bugs exist because society gives them an opening. The District Attorney (Harry Myers) addresses a roomful of concerned citizens, some of whom are in league with Bugs, and scolds them for letting racketeers hold the city hostage. Two corrupt businessmen promptly repent. The scene is essentially the film’s disclaimer and resembles one in the 1932 version of Scarface, in which Howard Hawks interrupts the gunfire to include a newspaper publisher rebuking the public for not standing up to organised crime. Yet the condemnations are half-hearted. The DA is also a moralising blowhard who warns his audience that if they’re not careful, they’ll soon have a society based on wealth, not intellectual attainment—an amusing statement from a capitalist during the Great Depression.
Perhaps this is because Brown realised nothing could compete with the film’s star attraction: Spencer Tracy. Bugs is a charismatic, cheerfully amoral gangster who is cunning and streetwise but doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. Tracy plays him with dazzling self-assurance. When Bugs decides to ram his truck into the town car’s fender, Tracy does so with a look of serene impudence that almost certainly wasn’t in the script—and tells you everything you need to know about Bugs before his first scene is over.
Quick Millions is a street-smart, streamlined crime film that tells its story with a minimum of fuss and builds to a conclusion so shockingly abrupt it still leaves viewers reeling. See it for Spencer Tracy, who makes a shameless criminal irresistible without once romanticising him—and gleefully absconds with the film.
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