WARNING: SPOILERS

The blind spots of the Production Code are fascinating. Has anyone written a book on this?

The Code was designed to (among many other things) stop Hollywood from glorifying criminals and undermining American institutions; and yet here, in “The Big Shot” from 1942, when the Code was at the height of its powers, we watch the noblest of cons getting screwed by the police, his lawyer, and the prison warden. He basically hits every crooked branch in our justice system on the way down, and no one at the Hays Office so much as blinked.

It's an odd film in the Humphrey Bogart oeuvre. It’s sandwiched between two classics, “The Maltese Falcon” and “Casablanca,” but Bogart is given the gangster role like it’s still 1938, and he’s surrounded by none of the shining lights of Warner Bros. Lewis Seiler is directing rather than, say, Michael Curtiz, and there’s no Epstein brothers to help with the script, and the supporting players include no Claude Rains, Peter Lorre or S.Z. Sakall. We don’t even get a Ward Bond.

Three raps
The movie begins with the deathbed scene of the titular big shot, Joseph “Duke” Berne (Bogie), who is surrounded by a prison warden (Minor Watson, one of the few faces I recognized), and that early 1940s Warners staple, a bland WASP couple, George Anderson and Ruth Carter (Richard Travis and Susan Peters). She’s tearful because apparently they owe Duke everything.

The rest is flashback, which opens with Duke just out of prison. Apparently they had a four-strike law back then? “Three raps,” he says in voiceover, walking down the street at night. “The next time they’d throw away the key.” He adds this, which is the whole 1977 Dustin Hoffman movie “Straight Time” in one quote:

“You can’t be a crook anymore because you used up your chances. And you can’t be honest because nobody’ll let ya. So what? So you keep moving.”

It’s at this point that his former gang begins to work on him to rejoin. Well, two guys. The dynamic is the same as the two cops trying to work Sam Spade in “The Maltese Falcon.” While good-guy Sandor (Howard Da Silva) understands Duke’s reluctance, and tells his partner to lay off, Frenchy (Joe Downing) is just an asshole, belittling Duke, ordering milk for him because he’s not a real man. They basically go good crook/bad crook. They say the job’s a cinch, that they got Fleming, they’re protected.

So Duke heads to the office of Martin T. Fleming, Attorney at Law (Stanley Ridges). Was his original idea to tell Fleming to lay off with the mugs? Either way, once he sees Fleming’s wife, Lorna (Irene Manning), he’s in. She’s the love of his life, and if she needs fancy hats like she gets from Fleming, then he he’ll get the dough to get them. Afterwards we get a reprise of the scene at the restaurant with Sandor and Frenchy, except this time Bogart acts like Bogart.

The night of the job, though, Lorna shows up and dissuades Duke—at gunpoint. So he’s not involved at all when the heist goes awry.

Even so…

1. A frazzled eyewitness, pressed by the police, fingers Duke.
2. Duke’s lawyer is Fleming. Not smart. His alibi is Lorna, but Duke is a gentleman and doesn’t want her mixed up in it, so he goes with Fleming’s manufactured alibi—a beefy innocent name George Anderson.
3. Except when Frenchy tells Fleming about Lorna—since he saw her hat at Duke’s—Fleming betrays both men. George is sent up for a year, Duke for life.

Got that? Duke has committed no crime, as the man sang, but he still has to do a sentence, as the man also sang. Immediately Duke plans on breaking out. Nothing to lose now. He gets involved with the prison theater, where a mug named Dancer (Chick Chandler) does a cringey minstrel bit with a comic life-sized Black doll. Oddly, this is the moment, with all eyes on them, that they break free. Works for Duke—Lorna is waiting on the other side, revving the car engine—but not for Dancer, who knifes a guard and is shot dead. George isn’t involved—he tries to talk Duke out of it and get cold-cocked—but when he wakes? He’s charged with the guard stabbing, which turns into a murder rap.

Yeah, another miscarriage of justice, and this time it’s not just an ex-gangster. A true innocent is staring at the death penalty because the powers-that-be just assumed. That’s our justice system. And Joe Breen and the Production Code was fine with it? So odd. Maybe they thought George deserved it for lying down with dogs.

At this point the movie gets boring fast. Duke and Lorna hide out in a mountain cabin in the Adirondacks, there’s unfunny comic relief about Duke’s unreadiness for the role, and Lorna plays grating/happy homemaker. But then Duke hears about poor George and decides to do the right thing. Or maybe he's bored, too. Except a bunch of wrongdoers—Fleming and Frenchy—sic the cops on them and Lorna is killed in the getaway. So Duke pays Fleming a night-time visit, guns are fired, Fleming buys it, Duke is wounded.

In the hospital, surrounded, Duke clears George’s name, has a last smoke, expires.

Frenchy endures.

Murder written all over him
Bogart is good. He’s always good. Some of the shots/lighting aren’t bad, either. I’m assuming less Lewis Seiler than cinematographer Sidney Hickox, but I’m hardly an expert in the field. He just has the better CV: “Gentleman Jim,” “To Have and Have Not,” “The Big Sleep,” “White Heat.” He finished doing episodes of “Mayberry R.F.D.”

I don’t think the movie is wrong in depicting miscarriages of justice, by the way, I just find it amusing that the Production Code was fine with it. Also, the miscarriages tend to be dramatic types: crooked lawyers, etc., The most accurate miscarriage of justice depicted, even if it’s presented through a comic lens, is eyewitness misidentification. At one point, asked to finger the man who grabbed her—Frenchy—she picks up a framed photo on the desk. 

Woman: If ever a man had murder written all over him…
Cop: Hold it, lady, that’s the police commissioner!

One of the few faces I recognized was Lorna, Irene Manning, who played Fay Templeton in “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” In that, I thought she was a little too MGM for Warners, but she actually began her career at Republic Pictures in the 1930s before being plucked by Warners for war-time movies (“Spy Ship,” “The Desert Song”), Belle Epoch musicals (“Shine on Harvest Moon”), and noirs like this. Mostly, though, she was used as the girl spread across the movie poster. But at least Warners used her. After the war, MGM grabbed her as a bargaining chip in its contract dispute with Jeannette Macdonald, then dumped her when the ink was dry. In three years with Warners she made eight features, two shorts and appeared in a “Canteen” movie as herself. At MGM, bupkis. She didn’t show up on screen again until 1950s TV. She did Playhouses, Showcases, Hours, and was gone again. She married a lot.

In her IMDb bio, there’s a quote about this picture and director Lewis Seiler, whom she calls mean and nasty. “But Bogie came to my rescue. He told me to completely ignore this man, to play the part the way I wanted to play it and everything would be fine—which it was.” Well, kinda.

Bogie, on the rise, did this one in January-February 1942, then was reteamed with John Huston, Mary Astor and Sidney Greenstreet for the wartime picture “Across the Pacific.” Just as this one was premiering in June, he began filming another wartime pic: “Casablanca.” That's the one that made him a big shot.

Apparently The Chronicle grabbed Duke's mugshot from the Warner Bros. publicity dept.