This 1930 First National production offers a rare star performance by character actor Grant Mitchell, best known to moviegoers of the 1930s and 40s for his many roles as harried husbands, dutiful physicians, and beleaguered family men. Based on a 1920 short story by writer Ben Ames Williams (whose 1944 novel Leave Her to Heaven would be adapted for films in 1945 with Mitchell in the cast), Man to Man (1930) charts the return to society of paroled honor killer "Barber John" Bolton and the effect this has on his college age son (Phillips Holmes). Bringing an unexpected potency to the melodramatic material is director Allan Dwan, poised here between his celebrated silent work with Douglas Fairbanks (Robin Hood [1922], The Iron Mask [1929]) and such later successes as Heidi (1937), The Three Musketeers (1939), and The Sands of Iwo Jima (1949). Man to Man represents a reworking of similar material (though from a different source) in Dwan's 1915 silent drama David Harum, down to the small town milieu and the plot point of the protagonist standing accused of stealing money from a bank. Man to Man is also notable for the appearance of Dwight Frye, whose next assignment was as the zoophagous madman Renfield in Tod Browning's Dracula (1931).

By Richard Harland Smith