oleeb Review of Stand Up and Fight

Stand Up and Fight (1939)

Ahead if it's time, this movie deals with a number of issues

[29 July 2018]

This is an interesting story and quite progressive for it's time. I've noticed that a couple of previous user reviews are inaccurate in terms of what goes on in the story. Robert Taylor is a spoiled aristocrat who loses his estate and lifestyle in the slave state of Marylan and for the first time in his life is forced to seek work. He is attracted to a beautiful Boston woman who owns a stagecoach line in western Maryland (Cumberland). He is arrogant and spurns the love interest who suggests he find work and himself heads west to Cumberland where he turns down a job working for the new B & O Railroad and ends up in jail after a bar fight. He is bailed out by Wallace Beery's character who runs the stage coach line and also profits on the side by using the line's wagons to spirit fugitive slave to freedom in nearby Pennsylvania. Unbehknownst to Beery, the man he thinks is an abolitionist running the slaves to freedom is actually reselling them into slavery in the south and murdering those slaves he cannot sell. This complicated tale becomes more complicated when the love interest arrives in Cumberland to "inspect" her stage coach line and finds that Robert Taylor is in jail and Wallace Beery has paid his bail in exchange for 3 months free labor on the stagecoach line. Taylor and Beery don't like one another at all and clash throughout the build of the movie even gettng into two fist fights. Talyor learns that the stage coach line's wagons are being used to resell the slaves who think they are headed to freedom and exposes it believing Beery's character is in on the heinous crime being perpetrated. In the end Taylor's efforts reveal the true nature of the man posing as an abolitionist but really selling the slaves back into slavery and the conflict between himself and Beery is resolved and in the bargain he gets the girl too. After all, it is Hollywood. Very interesting movie on numerous fronts including the slavery issue and it's many intriguting/horrifying facets, watching the very young Robert Taylor in action as a dashing young man who transforms from dilletente into an honorable , courageous man and to see Beery portraying a bigger than life ruffian who, though out for himself, is also a decent human being who wants to help slaves get to freedom. Definitely worth watching.