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Plot Synopsis

by Hal Erickson

Edmond O'Brien plays a telephone repairman whose electronic savvy earns him a job with a bookmaking concern. O'Brien's bookie boss Barry Kelly wants to get instant results from the nation's racetracks, and to this end O'Brien illicitly plugs into several communication centers. The wealthier O'Brien becomes, the more scruples he sheds. Eventually he runs afoul of the Big Boss of an Eastern bookie syndicate (Otto Kruger) and vainly attempts to escape with his life in a slam-bang final at Boulder Dam. 711 Ocean Drive was made to cash in on a then-current national newspaper expose of bookmaking operations.

  retro review

Despite some considerable advertising of "711 Ocean Drive" as a daring and courageous revelation of the big bookmaking and gambling syndicates, this modest Columbia melodrama, which came to the Paramount yesterday, is no more than an average crime picture with some colorful but vague details thrown in. Certainly no one who reads the papers with a fairly retentive eye can have any less comprehension of the gambling racket than is illustrated here.

To be sure, in pursuing a story of a poor but honest telephone man who gets mixed up in a bookmaker's wire-room and rises forthwith to be a big-time gambling boss, this picture does give some modest glimpses of how a wire service operates and how a fellow who is smart at electronics can pull some nifty and enterprising tricks. It shows how the book-makers gather their spot information from the tracks and, in one case, how the hero, by "past posting," is able to beat his enemy's book.

But the disservice to the betting public which these operations may entail is never demonstrated. As a matter of fact, one might gather from this film that the book-maker's complex machinery is a fine public service enterprise, as efficient in accommodating its clients as is Boulder Dam, which is dragged in toward the end. Indeed, it is not the book-maker who is the villain in this film. It is the suave and elusive syndicate gangster who makes the poor little free-enterprise "bookies" pay tribute to him.

And in its illustration of this vermin, "711 Ocean Drive" is no more original or revealing than 100 previous gangster films. He is the same evil fellow you have seen countless times before, and the story of his badgering of the hero is as familiar as the palm of your hand. The hero, whom Edmond O'Brien plays in a cocky, truculent way, is, indeed, something of a champion of the highest American ideals. All he wants to do is run his operation and make love to a syndicate gangster's wife—a thoroughly acceptable ambition, since the latter is beautiful, fragile, well-bred Joanne Dru. It is Otto Kruger as the boss of the syndicate who is the snake in the grass—he and Donald Porter as his henchman—a pair of contemptible racketeers. And the ultimate extirpation of Mr. O'Brien after a chase through Boulder Dam seems not so much a glorious triumph for law and order as a notch for the syndicate.

In short, this little picture, conventionally written but well photographed, does no more than any gangster picture in reminding us that gangsters are crooks. And when Senator Alexander Wiley of Wisconsin, who is a member of the special Senate committee investigating crime, remarks in a face-to-face foreword that "honest pictures like '711 Ocean Drive' can be a tremendous constructive factor in informing the public of the meaning of that innocent $2 racing bet at the candy store," he leads us to wonder how well he is acquainted with American gangster films.

On the stage at the Paramount are Louis Jordan and his Tympany Five, the Fontane Sisters, Bobby Van, Rudy Cardenas and Bob Chester and his orchestra.

George W. George and a story by Leon Ware.

"All Quiet On the Western Front," Universal's version of the Erich Maria Remarque novel, will begin an exclusive revival stand at the Park Avenue Theatre on Wednesday. The drama, directed by Lewis Milestone and featuring Lew Ayres and Louis Wolheim, was first released in 1930.

Judge Samuel I. Rosenman, attorney for Louis de Rochemont, producer of "Lost Boundaries," will file a petition in the United States Supreme Court to review the decision upholding the banning of the film in Atlanta, Ga. The decision was made by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which, the company announcement stated, held the Atlanta ordinance constitutional on the authority of a 1915 Supreme Court decision.

711 OCEAN DRIVE screen play by Richard English and Francis Swan; directed by Joseph H. Newman; produced by Frank N. Seltzer and released by Columbia Pictures. At the Paramount.
Mal Granger . . . . . Edmund O'Brien
Gail Mason . . . . . Joanne Dru
Larry Mason . . . . . Donald Porter
Chippie Evans . . . . . Sammy White
Trudy Maxwell . . . . . Dorothy Patrick
Vince Walters . . . . . Barry Kelley
Carl Stephans . . . . . Otto Kruger
Lieut. Pete Wright . . . . . Howard St. John
Gizzi . . . . . Robert Osterloh
Marshak . . . . . Bert Freed
Joe Gish . . . . . Carl Milletaire
Rocco . . . . . Charles La Torre
Peterson . . . . . Fred Aldrich
Tim . . . . . Charles Jordan
Mendel Weiss . . . . . Sidney Dubin