Meanwhile, Bogart is a manager, gambler, and gangster. To protect Morris from Bogart's nefarious activities, Carey sends Morris to live with Robinson's mother, Soledad Jiménez. There, Morris meets Jane Bryan, Robinson's fetching young adult sister. A love rectangle between Morris, Bryan, Davis, and Robinson leaves both Robinson and Davis out, and Morris and Bryan in.
Because it is a movie, the former bellboy predictably wins all his fights, and inevitably meets William Haade for the title. We all know who will win that one as well. Robinson and Bogart gun each other down, but it is a happy ending for Morris and Bryan.
How others will see it. Although anyone who has seen a movie before can usually guess what will happen next, Kid Galahad is well regarded today. At imdb.com, it has a respectable 7.2 (out of 10) user rating and a high (for its era) user vote total of 4.3K. The user reviews rave over the three A-list stars in the lead roles, with less praise given to future Casablanca director Michael Curtiz. Much mirth is made of Davis' dubbed turn as a nightclub siren. Apparently, the only time she ever actually sings in a movie is in the wartime flag-waver Thank Your Lucky Stars (1943).
At the time of its release, though, Kid Galahad caused little stir. It was not nominated for any Academy Awards. A quarter-century later, the movie was remade as an Elvis Presley vehicle, and the original version was retitled The Battling Bellhop to avoid confusion, despite the existence of the Buster Keaton silent boxing feature Battling Butler (1926).
How I felt about it. The biggest strike against Kid Galahad is its plot, which manages to include every boxing movie cliché, such as managers rigging bouts and betting against their own fighter, and the eventual winner getting knocked down repeatedly during bouts, only to rise again and again at the count of nine. Defense is boring, so the fighters take turns pummelling each other, while Robinson and Bogart at ringside make faces according to which fighter is dishing it out.
The romance between Morris and Bryan consists of the two arguing until they decide it is true love. Bette Davis secretly pines for incorruptible aw-shucks all-American farm boy Morris, understandable given that the alternative is the unlovable Edward G. Robinson. Robinson is somehow Bryan's sister despite their 25-year age gap, not to mention the 42-year gap between Bryan and her onscreen mother Jiménez.
Bogart resided as Warner's go-to gangster until he finally attained top billing in A pictures with The Maltese Falcon (1941). He was a gangster in The Petrified Forest (1936), Dead End (1937), Angels with Dirty Faces (1938), and The Roaring Twenties (1939), to mention only his most famous roles from that decade.