314. Trapped By Television

314. Trapped By Television (1936)
Director: Del Lord
Writers: Lee Loeb and Harold Buchman from a story by Sherman L. Lowe and Al Martin
From: Sci-Fi Invastion (only 3 remain!)
Watch: archive.org

An inventor seeking investment for a new form of television has to deal with saboteurs trying to undermine him.

For something called Trapped By Television on the Sci-Fi Invasion set, you’d expect something more, well, sci-fi. Instead this is a pretty low-key studio one-off. The movie doesn’t have much drama or plot and is just a hair over an hour long so it feels like it was made to fill time at movie theaters.

Rocky is a bill collector with an interest in science. He’s sent to collect a debt from Fred, an inventor working on a new form of broadcast camera and television. Rocky is so enamored with the idea of Fred being an inventor that he doesn’t collect the debt and instead gets Fred a job as a bill collector himself. Fred then goes to collect a debt from Ms. Bobby Blake, a, for lack of a better term, venture capitalist. He accidentally hands her a schematic for his invention and she decides to become an investor. She takes the proposal over to Mr. Curtis at the Paragon Broadcasting Corporation to get him to invest in finishing costs. Mr. Curtis is in a bad way because the engineers he’s been paying to develop broadcasting equipment for him have gone missing. One has kidnapped (then murdered) the other and is working with two people inside the company to make sure Curtis buys their equipment instead.

It sounds more complicated than it is and more complicated than how it plays out on-screen. Basically, Fred is the honest man at the root of a series of grifts.

I’m inclined to leave the description there because I enjoyed this movie—I found it charmingly ridiculous—but I’m not sure if it’s possible to spoil something like this. It’s a movie from 1936. The villains interfere with the inventor, he has a falling out with Blake who he’s started to fall in love with, and he’s both materially and romantically triumphant by THE END.

As I noted, the movie’s only just over an hour and there’s not a lot of drama. You’d expect the villains to play a larger role in the piece, but they really only show up for two scenes: one to explain and enact their plan and one to try to sabotage and assault our leads. Otherwise, it’s just the protagonists working toward their goal and worrying about whether they’ve placed their faith in the right people.

And I found the movie charming. It’s a simple bit of fluff with actors who know what they’re doing. Everything has the look of a cheap noir, the actors even sound like parodies of those kinds of figures, but everyone’s tongue is firmly in their cheek, no one more so than Rocky. He’s the tough bill collector who keeps repeating, “Science is my hobby.” He’s the tough guy easily distracted by a shiny bauble, always toeing the line of being cartoonish without ever crossing it. I mean, the movie has a scene where he’s in a cab demanding the cabbie drive faster. The cabbie responds, “If you think you can do better, you drive.” Next shot, Rocky’s driving.

It’s such a simple, stupid moment and the movie included it because that moment is precisely the tone and ethic of the film. I don’t say this about a lot of movies, but it charmed me, I was legitimately charmed by this movie. So I recommend it. It just makes things feel a little nicer.

To make things even better, the movie is in the public domain. I’ve added a copy to archive.org here. You should give it a peek.