Movie Reviews - 1950s posts

WARNING: SPOILERS

For something called “Double Dynamite,” a comedy with a poster of Jane Russell wearing an off-the-shoulder number seated next to Groucho Marx living up to his “King Leer” sobriquet, this is one buttoned-up movie. Russell certainly remains buttoned up—not a trace of decolletage—and there’s nothing sexy or smoldering about her character. Mildred “Mibs” Goodhue is an innocent. She’s Lois Lane in the 1950s—smart, dynamic and pretty, but she’d rather just get married. (And man what a Lois Lane Russell could’ve been.) It’s a movie about taking chances and the movie doesn’t.

Neither did its studio, RKO, headed by Howard Hughes, who never met a movie he couldn’t tinker with. This was particularly true of Ms. Russell’s movies:

• The Outlaw: filmed 1940-41, premiered 1943, distributed 1946
• Double Dynamite: filmed 1948, premiered December 1951
• Macao: filmed 1950, premiered 1952

History has given Hughes credit for keeping “The Outlaw” out of distribution to build interest, but wasn’t the delay due to Production Code problems over Jane Russell’s general unbuttonedness? So aren’t we once again, as with Elon today, giving the rich guy the benefit of the doubt because he’s the rich guy? When he’s actually kind of an idiot? Foster Hirsch, for one, in his book Hollywood and the Movies of the Fifties, describes Hughes as the worst executive in studio-era Hollywood: “a colossally erratic as well as inept CEO.”

This movie is Exhibit A. If Hughes had released it when it was finished, in 1948, it would’ve starred the most popular singer/romantic lead of the day, Frank Sinatra, but by ’51 Sinatra’s star had fallen and with it his billing: Hughes dropped him from first- to third-billed. And in ’48, it would’ve played in theaters with an average weekly attendance of 60 million; instead, thanks to television and suburbanization, that number was down to about 35 million by 1951. “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,” Groucho’s character says during the film. Hughes didn’t listen.

I'm curious if some of the delay went beyond Hughes' usual dithering. The man hated Sinatra and apparently wanted to hurt his career. Thus third billing. Thus no Frank on the poster. Thus this opening title credit:

Wait, was that the point of the title change? The movie was originally called “It’s Only Money,” a song Groucho and Sinatra sing about 30 minutes in. But did they go with “Double Dynamite” not only to remind everyone of Russell’s assets (as if we needed reminding) but to shunt Frank further aside? These two are dynamite, RKO is saying, not Ol' Whatshisface from the war years.

Machinations
Even if Hughes had been quicker on the draw, and less vindictive, I doubt the movie would’ve killed at the box office. Too meh.

Sinatra plays Johnny Dalton, bank clerk, who can’t get a raise or a break. Mibs wants to get married but he calculates their combined annual income is $4,212.25 ($50-$55k today), and that ain’t cutting it. We get some not-bad lines:

Johnny: How would we live?
Mibs: I’m sure something would come along.
Johnny: Yeah, and we'd have to feed that, too.

This leads to a greatly ironic Sinatra moment: Returning from lunch, Johnny sees two mobsters beating up a guy in an alleyway, so he takes on the mob. The victim, gambler/bookie “Hot Horse” Harris (Nestor Paiva), is so grateful he gives Johnny $1,000. When Johnny objects, the guy bets it on the horses for him. Twice. Now Johnny has $60k. Now he and Mibs can marry!

Except: At that exact same moment, there’s a meeting at the bank: Someone has embezzled $75k. If Johnny’s sudden boon becomes known, he’ll be Suspect No. 1.

Cue machinations to keep everything on the down low. He’s already told his friend Emile J. Keck (Groucho), a waiter at the local restaurant, and he’s already bought a few items, including a mink coat for Mibs, which the two men steal and send back. That pisses off Mibs, allowing the bank president’s son and wolf-in-the-making, R.B. “Bob” Pulsifer Jr. (Don McGuire), to make his play. I never quite got ol’ R.B. Jr., to be honest. He’s straightforward about his intentions and gentlemanly at times; yet he’s the one who turns in Johnny. It’s a Jack Carson role McGuire doesn’t quite land.

All the machinations turn out to be unnecessary. Johnny spends the movie looking for “Hot Horse” to clear his name; except he’s already done it—from prison. Johnny’s in the clear. At the 11th hour, it’s Mibs who gets arrested, since the discrepancy was at her window. Except the discrepancy was just a glitch in her adding machine. It’s the crime that wasn’t.

You bet your life
I’m curious if Hughes’ tinkering with the film included the APB scene, where a police dispatcher, in that familiar drone, not only reads off a description of Mibs (“…extremely well distributed”) but Johnny:

Caucasian. Brown hair. Blue eyes. Five feet ten. Wears elevator shoes. Anemic looking. When last seen, was wearing ill-fitted suit. Well-padded at shoulders. Resembles Frank Sinatra.

On one level it’s a fun break-the-fourth-wall gag, but it also feels a little too revealing for Hollywood. It’s Hughes telling the world what a short, skinny nothing the guy is.

“Double D” is the last film directed by Irving Cummings, who acted in early silents, shifted to directing in the 1920s, then made a name for himself directing Shirley Temple movies in the ’30s and Bob Hope comedies in the ’40s. Don McGuire, ol’ R.B. Jr., soon left acting for one of the most eclectic screenwriting careers imaginable. A former journalist and PR man, he pushed out a few quick screenplays, did some forgettable Sinatra movies (“Meet Danny Wilson,” “Johnny Concho”), adapted the acclaimed “Bad Day at Black Rock” in 1955, co-wrote Jerry Lewis’ “The Delicate Delinquent” in 1957, then created the Jackie Cooper TV series “Hennesey” in the late ’50s/early ’60s. Twenty years later, he won an Academy for co-writing “Tootsie.” 

As for Groucho? In the three years between this film’s production and release, “You Bet Your Life” went from radio to TV, where he would be ensconced until 1961. He lived long enough to see that great Marx Bros. revival in the 1970s but not long enough to see whatever the opposite of a revival is. Shame. I like to live a world where the Marx Bros. matter.

WARNING: SPOILERS

It’s not a bad premise. In the titular Portuguese-Chinese colony, we see a man being pursued by crime lord Vincent Halloran (Brad Dexter) and several henchmen, including Itzumi (Korean-American actor Philip Ahn), who delivers the fatal blow, tossing a knife into the man’s back. Except the dude was a cop. Now New York is sending another cop to bring Halloran to justice. (Not Itzumi? It’s almost an insult.)

Cut to: a boat making its way from Hong Kong to Macao, where we run into three Americans:

• Nick Cochran (Robert Mitchum), a down-on-his-luck adventurer
• Julie Benton (Jane Russell), a down-on-her-luck chanteuse
• Lawrence C. Trumble (William Bendix), a happy-go-lucky salesman of coconut oil, stockings and cigars

One of them, of course, is the cop.

That’s the fun part—trying to guess. The crime boss assumes it’s Nick, and who wouldn’t? Look at him. I assumed it was Trumble/Bendix, because he’s comic relief, but I was holding out hope the cop was Jane Russell. Wouldn’t that be amazing? The movie would be so ahead of its time.

Nope. Of its time.

The nonsense crescendo
Another example: They were still doing the post-WWII narration thing. That was disappointing—hearing Truman Bradley’s stentorian voice at the open over nondescript establishing shots:

This is Macao, a fabulous speck on the earth’s surface, just off the south coast of China, a 35-mile boat trip from Hong Kong. It’s an ancient Portuguese colony, quaint and bizarre. The crossroads of the Far East, its population is a mixture of all races and nationalities—mostly Chinese. Macao, often called the Monte Carlo of the Orient, has two faces: one, calm and open; the other, veiled and secret. Here, millions in gold and diamonds change hands, some across the gambling tables, some mysteriously in the night. Macao is a fugitive’s haven, for, at the three-mile limit, the authority of the International Police comes to an end.

A lot of unnecessary info amid that mess.

On the boat to Macao, the first person we see isn’t any of our three stars, but a guy dancing—not badly but somewhat comically—in his stateroom. He’s dancing before Julie, on whom the camera slowly pans up until we see her face, looking bemused and sardonic in that great Jane Russell way. She’s taking the boat to Macao on his dime and he wants a little something-something in return. A dance? Nah. Another drink? Nah. That’s when he gets all handsy. She takes off her shoe as a weapon but her aim is off: it goes through the ship portal and hits a passerby—Nick. That’s their meet-cute: attempted rape. The whole thing is treated lightly. When Nick saunters in, for example, Handsy is still getting handsy. 

Julie (fending the dude off): Do you mind giving me a hand!
Nick (staring at her appreciatively): Don’t think I wouldn’t enjoy that.

Yeah, Nick isn’t exactly a knight in shining armor. Even after he knocks out Handsy, he notes the whisky, the private stateroom, and suggests they stick around. “One side, Clyde,” she says, but allows herself to be kissed, long and slow, so she can pick Nick’s pocket.

It's out on deck that she meets the gladhanding Lawrence C. Trumble and his suitcase of wares, and all three meet up again before customs, where they’re questioned by Lt. Sebastian (Thomas Gomez). Nick is even more down-on-his-luck now: Julie took his dough and tossed his passport overboard. They still let him into the country. Kinda.

Sebastian actually works for Halloran, and since they suspect Nick is the cop, they try to kick him out of the country for vagrancy—which makes sense—but Julie slips him some of his dough back. So then they try to kick him out for not having a passport. Kidding. That’s never raised again. Instead, we get a crescendoing of nonsensical actions. Halloran lets Nick win at craps, ratcheting it up to $12k before taking it all away. Why? That just leads to a sampan boatride between Nick and Julie, where they canoodle and talk about a life together—though Nick says he wants to support her first. That leads to Julie assuming she’s getting the ol’ brushoff again—as if 1950 Jane Russell was always getting the ol’ brushoff.

More nonsense: Trumble asks Nick to show Halloran a diamond from a necklace that’s in a hotel safe in Hong Kong, in case he’d like to buy it. I’ll cut to the chase: Trumble is the cop and he’s trying to lure Halloran outside the three-mile limit so he can be arrested. Why doesn’t he do it himself? Why does he risk a civilian’s life? Exactly. And Nick’s life is risked. He’s kidnapped, basically, and when Julie tries to spring him, he pretends he’s shacking up with Halloran’s assistant Margie (an underused Gloria Grahame) because he’s got a gun at his back. More misunderstandings. When Nick does bust loose, he’s chased around the waterfront by Itzumi and another hood (Spencer Chan, I believe), but the one who gets the knife in the back is Trumble. Yeah, they accidentally kill the right guy. All of which is foreshadowed by an earlier line: “I'll go back one of these days or my name isn't Lawrence C. Trumble.” It isn’t and he doesn’t.

It's Julie who finally lures Halloran past the three-mile limit, but even here the International Police aren’t much help, flashing lights around and alerting Halloran, so Nick has to duke it out with him. But: bad guy caught, and good-bad guy winds up with good-bad girl. Just like we wanted.

Anyway, it’s not much. 

Sitting out the war
Most cinephiles know Howard Hughes discovered Jane Russell for “The Outlaw,” which had a much-delayed release, mostly because of Production Code and local censorship board difficulties. It was filmed during the winter of 1940-41, had reshoots that spring, but didn’t premiere until two years later, in February 1943, in San Francisco. It set house records but Hughes couldn’t find other theaters to run it, so it didn’t get a wider release until spring 1946. Basically, between when it was filmed and when people got to see it, all of World War II happened.

That’s less bug than feature for Hughes. He was a tinkerer. “Macao,” for example, was filmed in August-October 1950, then additional scenes were shot six months later, and then again six months after that. And even then it didn’t premiere for another eight months—in April 1952. “The Outlaw” sat out WWII, “Macao” the Korean War.

This is Josef von Sternberg’s first feature since “The Shanghai Gesture” in 1941, and one of his last features ever, and it wasn’t even all him; the retakes were done by Nicholas Ray and Robert Stevenson. Nothing really stands out except a shot where the principles’ reflection on the water is filmed rather than them.

I liked seeing Philip Ahn again even though he isn’t given much to do. Ditto Thomas Gomez, who had that great scene in “Force of Evil” but usually plays gangster flunky. Mitchum is his usual seamless self. And then there’s Russell. She’s great when she’s saucy and sardonic—her pouty lip curl is like Elvis before Elvis—but she's even more beautiful when she softens a bit. She’s got beautiful eyes. They probably didn’t get noticed much.

The eyes have it: Elvis before Elvis, Hoffs before Hoffs.

WARNING: SPOILERS

The movie begins with Gillian Holroyd (Kim Novak) sitting bored in her shop, and I quickly found myself bored by the film. Because of that? Is watching a bored person boring? I’m trying to think of a fascinating movie that focuses on a bored person and coming up blank.

“Bell, Book and Candle” seems like a great idea for a film. Kim Novak plays a witch who seduces “Vertigo” pal Jimmy Stewart on the day he'll get married. My local theater, SIFF Egyptian, played it on a recent Sunday as part of its Halloween program. I didn’t know much about it so decided to check it out. “Maybe there’s a reason it’s being resurrected,” I thought. “Maybe there’s something there.”

There isn’t.

Catty
Gillian runs a shop full of African artifacts on the ground floor of a Manhattan apartment building where both her aunt (Elsa Lanchester, Bride of Frankenstein), and publisher Shepherd Henderson (Stewart) live. She doesn’t have many customers but she doesn’t seem to mind. She just minds the boredom. These are the first lines of the film. It’s Gillian talking to Pyewacket, her Siamese cat: 

What's the matter with me? Why do I feel this way? It’s such a rut. The same old thing day after day. Same old people. I know I’m feeling sorry for myself but it’s true. Why don't you give me something for Christmas, Pye? … What would I like? … I'd like to do something different. I’d like to meet someone different.

She decides that Shepherd is that someone. Coincidentally, her aunt already has a hand in. She shows up at his place uninvited, and after he tells her to leave she casts a spell on his telephone, requiring him to borrow Gillian’s phone to call the phone company.

Stewart’s Shepherd is mostly an innocent in this movie, but you gotta wonder: Did he knock on Gillian’s door because Kim Novak was on the other side? Sly dog.

Plus he keeps showing up. It’s Christmas Eve, and though Shepherd is meeting his bride-to-be, Merle Kittridge (Janice Rule), Gillian offhandedly mentions a pub she and her fam will be at, and guess what? Shepherd shows up! With Merle! Then it gets catty. In college, Gillian and Merle didn’t like each other, so Gillian cast a spell to make Merle … what was it … frightened? Of thunder and lightning? In the present day, Gillian casts a spell to make Shepherd fall in love with her.

Could anything be more perfectly Hollywood patriarchal than that? Kim Novak having to cast a spell to make a 50-year-old man fall for her? 

It works, of course. He breaks it off with What’s-Her-Name and sets to canoodling with Gillian. Oh, right. She also casts a spell to send a big-name author, Sidney Redlitch (Ernie Kovacs), to Shepherd, and thank god. Kovacs is a breath of fresh air in this thing. Redlitch is interested in the supernatural but mostly interested in his next drink. At one point they offer him bourbon or whiskey, he downs whatever they give him and asks what it was. Told whiskey, he requests the bourbon. Everything Kovacs does works in a way that the rest of the film does not. Kovacs is off-kilter and perfect.

For his next book, Redlitch is sussing out—coincidence alert!—witches in New York, and guess who helps? Gillian’s bongo-playing warlock brother Nicky (Jack Lemmon). For some reason, he’s willing to give up the ghost, and admit everything, to get a few bucks. Apparently blinking money or gold into existence isn’t a thing for these witches. 

The bongo-playing makes me wonder, though, if the whole witches enclave idea didn't spring from, I don’t know, someone checking out Beatniks or homosexuals or some other in Greenwich Village. Fifties culture was staid and bland but there were subterranean movements that would soon shift everything. Was this movie a bland harbinger of all that?

Admittedly, it most just feels like 1950s floof, and the last half is pretty convoluted. Gillian confesses about the spell, Shep doesn’t believe her. Then he does believe her and breaks up with her, and goes to another witch to have her spell removed, but he can’t convince Merle about the spell so she'll take him back. Meanwhile, Gillian is falling apart, particularly since Pyewacket keeps running away from her. Because she’s no longer a witch. You lose your witchiness, apparently, if you fall in love, which she’s done with Shep, and the proof is when she cries. Witches can’t cry. When Shep realizes this, he takes her in his arms and kisses her. Happy ending.

Unmentioned is the fact that she cries not when Shep leaves her but when Pyewacket does. That’s the true love story.

Broomsticks
Given the talent in the room, the thing’s a slog. It had some success. It got Novak (and Pyewacket) on the cover of Life magazine, and it (along with “I Married a Witch”) inspired the successful 1960s TV sitcom “Bewitched." But it wasn’t the success they thought it would be. It certainly didn’t last—the screening at SIFF notwithstanding.

Apparently Stewart thought he was awkward in the lead, was tired of romancing women half his age, and stopped taking romantic lead roles thereafter. His next, “Anatomy of a Murder,” was actually perfect for him.

The title is a reference to exorcising a witch—“ring the bell, close the book, quench the candle”—but it’s a bad title. I keep wanting to go “Bedknobs and Broomsticks.” Which, come to think of it, is a better title. For this. Even if we don't see bedknobs.

WARNING: SPOILERS

The movie poster kind of gives away the goods, doesn’t it? Not that there’s much good in them.

At the outset, Stan (Kevin McCarthy), a big-band clarinetist, is having a nightmare. He’s in a small, mirrored room, where a man is attempting to open a safe with a blowtorch, while a beautiful blonde (Marian Carr), first seen as a floating head, stands nearby. Then the man tries to choke Stan. They go round and round, and the blonde hands the man an icepick, except, oops, she hands it to Stan who sticks it in the other guy. Cue Nelson Riddle-like blare of music. The girl flees, Stan hides the body, steps outside and falls, and falls, and falls…

And wakes up. Whew!

Except! What are these odd bruises around his neck? Why the bloodstains on his sleeve? And where did he get this odd-shaped key?

He calls in sick to work (with Billy May and his Orchestra) and wanders the town. “I had to get out of my room,” he tells us via voiceover. “Out into the sunshine. I had to stay out of the shadows.“

A lot of the movie is this kind of voiceover. It gets old fast. One generation’s arty is the next generation’s eyeroll.

Eventually he goes to see his brother-in-law, Rene (Edward G. Robinson), who’s in the garage working on his boat, but during the day is a New Orleans homicide detective. Whereas earlier Stan was confused about whether the murder was in a dream or not, now he’s certain. “It happened, Rene, it happened!” he insists. Rene tells him to take a vacation. “C’mon, kid,” he says. “Let’s wrap ourselves around some chow.”

So Stan investigates on his own. In his dream, he remembers a slow, melancholy tune, a dirge, but he can’t place it, and goes around town playing it before bandmates and famed New Orleans musicians—such as Meade “Lux” Lewis making a cameo. “Sorry, Stan,” Lewis says. “I guess I lose the $64,000.”

But guess who he spots at Meade’s bar? The blonde! They drink rye, she suggests going back to her place, they neck for two seconds, and then he sees the reflection of their reflection in the mirror—his back, her front—things get wavy, and he begs off, learning nothing.

Days go by. More fretting and frustration. Then Rene shows up with his wife, Stan’s sister (Virginia Christine, who played Mrs. Olson in Folgers commercials for decades), and Stan’s songstress girlfriend Gina (Connie Russell), for a picnic in the country. Stan relents, then suggests Bayou Lafourche, but doesn’t know why; and when a thunderstorm sends them scattering, Stan tells them where to drive: over this bridge and toward that mansion. It’s like he’s been there before! Nobody’s home, but Stan finds the spare key ... in the flower pot! Then they go in and make themselves at home—as one does.

For some reaason, Rene now believes Stan really did murder someone. “You didn’t have the guts to say, ‘Look, Rene, I went to such-and-such a place and killed a guy!’” he shouts. “You had to cook up a dream!” As they argue in the kitchen, guess who walks in? Deputy Torrence (Rhys Williams), who’s been watching the place, the Belknap mansion, because, yes, a double homicide was committed there. The more they look into it, the more all signs point to Stan. And when Rene drops him back at his place, this is his parting advice: “Run out. I’m giving you that one last chance. When they catch up with you, I want you to meet your finish somewhere else, not here.” Geez, thanks, bro-in-law.

After a suicide attempt that Rene foils, Rene finally asks the question he should’ve asked back at the garage: “Tell me everything that happened that night.” The key to it all? His kooky neighbor, Britten, at the Hotel New Orleans, who foists cough drops and daiquiris on him, and who that night showed up with a candle to say his lights were out, then retreated, telling Stan over and over: “You’re tired… you’re tired.”

Yes, two-thirds of the way through we finally get to the hypnosis that the movie poster spills at the outset.

Nightmare, I did
Britten, Rene figures out, is actually Mr. Belknap (Gage Clarke), and he hypnotized the notoriously suggestive Stan into … I guess showing up at the Belknap place and standing around until someone tried to choke him? And hopefully the girl would hand him an icepick by mistake? Seriously, what was Belknap’s plan? And who did he want killed—safecracker Bob Clune (Sol Gorss) or his own wife, whom we never see, and who is run over by a car even though Stan can’t drive? Or was the blonde his wife? And the pickup at Meade’s bar was in fact a case of mistaken identity? Which makes you wonder why she couldn’t keep her hands off Stan. Was she a prostitute? No offense, Kevin.

As for the dirge no one recognizes? That’s a familiar tune played at a slower speed. So did Belknap play it at a slower speed to aid with the hypnosis, or did Stan hear it at a slower speed because of his hypnotic state? And if Belknap can hypnotize Stan into, whatever, showing up during a safecracking, why doesn’t he hypnotize him into sticking around at the scene of the crime? Or into writing a confession? Think of the work that went into this idiot plot. He stayed at the hotel for a week, priming Stan, and only got what he wanted because the icepick wound up in the wrong hands. And then he has to run over his wife with a car.

Apparently all that’s not enough to exonerate Stan—who, after all, did kill the safecracker. So Rene works with the local cops to record Belknap 1) confessing to the crime, and 2) hypnotizing Stan again (to show the law that it could be done).

“Nightmare” is based on a novella, “And So to Death,” by Cornell Woolrich, who was the source material for dozens of films, most notably Hitchcock’s “Rear Window,” and whose work, someone wrote, tends to be heavy on atmosphere and light on plausibility. Checks out here anyway. The movie was adapted by its director, Maxwell Shane, who did five noir features in 10 years: “Fear in the Night,” “City Across the River,” “The Glass Wall,” “The Naked Street,” and this. This was the end of the line.

I like the location shooting around 1950s New Orleans—including a shot of the vertical neon “Hotel New Orleans” sign with the “s” burned out. I also like one bit of dialogue. After Rene’s “Run out” speech, Stan tries to kill himself by jumping out of his 15th floor window. He’s on the ledge, sweating, fretting, and a crowd gathers. Rene sees, and rushes back in. He tells the elevator operator “15th floor!” A few seconds later, we cut back to them.

Rene (frantic): Can’t you go any faster?
Elevator operator (bored): Got it wide open. 

In his memoir, Edward G. Robinson devotes barely a sentence to the film. It was made during the post-HUAC phase of his career, after he’d been accused of disloyalty and made to come hat-in-hand to the likes of Ward Bond so he could keep working. But he’d been relegated to B-pictures, which he did for money and for something to do, hating himself all the while. “Hell on Frisco Bay I did, and it was hell in Beverly Hills,” he writes. “Nightmare, I did, and it was nightmare all around me.”

The car ride to Bayou Lafourche looks like a scene from a failed '50 TV sitcom, “Brother-in-Law Knows Best,” about a New Orleans detective, his coffee-loving wife, her grumpy, twitchy brother, and his big-band-singing girlfriend. Tonight's episode: “Sunday Picnic”!

WARNING: SPOILERS 

Trivia question: What is Humphrey Bogart doing the last time we ever see him on a movie screen? 

1. Walking down a lonely wet street in New York
2. Dying gutshot in a lonely wet street in New York
3. Sitting before a typewriter, pecking out a story
4. Saluting a friend as he takes a bus out of town

Yes, this is Bogie’s last movie but I doubt he knew it. It was filmed in late 1955, he was diagnosed with cancer in January ’56, and he died a year later, in January ’57, age 56. Half a century later, the American Film Institute would vote him the greatest movie star in Hollywood history—a fate he certainly didn’t foresee when he was a sniveling villain forever being killed at the hands of Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney while wishing for a career like Paul Muni’s.

“The Harder They Fall” isn’t bad—it’s got a 7.5 IMDb rating—but it’s a dated social responsibility movie. Early on, we know what everyone’s doing wrong, and they keep doing it. For nearly two hours.

Dives for the short-end money
Bogie plays Eddie Willis, a respected sportswriter who lost his job when his newspaper folded, and who’s been pursued ever since by gangster Nick Benko (Rod Steiger) to be press agent for his stable of boxers. Eddie always turns him down. This time, Eddie says yes. And this time, he has someone to write about: Toro Moreno (Mike Lane), a 6’ 8” man-mountain from Argentina, who turns heads as he arrives in the U.S. over the opening credits.

Except, in the ring, Toro’s punches are weak and so is his jaw. Eddie still takes the gig. Why? He says he wants a big payout but why does he think this is it? The kid can’t punch. But maybe he knows the boxing game better than we do. Because they scam their way from one victory to the next, getting better boxers to talk a fall. That’s right, two years after “On the Waterfront,” Rod Steiger gets fighters to take them dives for the short-end money. But here it works. And here, there’s no guilt.

Not for Nick Benko anyway. Eddie, yes. Half the movie is Bogie’s face torn with moral anguish.

Eddie’s original take is a mere $250 a week plus expenses. But after Toro’s first suspect victory on the west coast, which leads to boos from the crowd and a potential boxing commission investigation, Nick puts Eddie in charge. And for his troubles, Eddie gets 10% of Toro. Now there’s real money in the banana stand. And off they go, riding from town to town, west coast to Midwest to east coast, in a tour bus with Toro’s outsized image on the side: NEXT HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMPION OF THE WORLD. And in each stop, Toro wins a fixed fight. Who knows they’re fixed? Eddie’s colleague Art Leavitt (Harold J. Stone), for one, who hosts a TV show, but Eddie gets him to keep it to himself. Eddie’s wife, Beth (Jan Sterling), figures it out, too. These two are the moral forces of this universe. They’re on one of Eddie’s shoulders, while Nick and the dough are on the other. And he keeps going for Nick and the dough. But with anguish. Always with anguish.

In Chicago, Toro takes on Gus Dundee (Pat Comiskey) for a title shot at heavyweight champ Buddy Brannen (1930s heavyweight champ Max Baer). Dundee had just fought Brannen and gotten his head knocked in—and he’s still suffering the consequences. So much so that Toro’s limp punches wind up not only winning the match but killing him. Toro was fighting a dead man. But now he feels guilty. Now he feels he’s too powerful.

We keep getting little minidramas. Nick keeps creating storms, forcing Eddie to calm the waters. Example: Before the Dundee fight, Toro’s Argentine manager wonders when they’re going to get paid, so Nick sends him back to Argentina, but then that causes Toro to run away. It’s Eddie who brings him back to the fold. After the Dundee fight, it seems like Toro is being corrupted—he’s boozing it up with a blonde—but that minidrama goes away when Toro gets a letter from a priest in Argentina, his mother’s priest, telling him to stop fighting since he’s killing men. Once again, Eddie returns him to the fold. Just this title fight, he tells him. Then he can go home a rich man.

The drama of the title fight? Brannen is angry because he thinks he should get credit for killing Dundee, not this powderpuff giant, so he’s ready to tear Toro apart. At this point, Eddie lets Toro know he’s not a killer but a fraud. “You don’t punch hard enough to bust an egg,” he tells him. What to do? They conspire with ring man George (Jersey Joe Walcott!!!!) to box in a style that keeps the damage to a minimum.

And then Toro doesn’t follow through. He tries to win, and at one point even knocks down the champ (like Rocky in “Rocky”), but eventually gets his face knocked in (like Rocky in “Rocky). Brannen even breaks Toro’s jaw. And in the aftermath, we get the best line in the movie, spoken by Jersey Joe Walcott:

Eddie: Why did he take that awful beating? Why didn’t he fight like you told him to?
George: Some guys can sell out, and others just can’t.

And Eddie is a guy who can sell out. Thus endeth the lesson, moviegoers.

Except it doesn't end there. There are more betrayals first.

Here’s looking at you, kid
Nick sells Toro to another promoter, Jim Weyerhause (Edward Andrews, the epitome of the mid-century white-collar criminal), who plans to take him on the road once the jaw heals. Meanwhile, the books have been cooked. The gate brought in more than $1 million, but after everyone, including Eddie, take their cut, Toro’s payout amounts to exactly $49.07. He won’t be a rich man returning home but a poor man in indentured servitude.

Which is when Eddie finally chooses a side.

He gets Toro out of the hospital, takes him to the airport, puts him on a plane to Argentina. For good measure, he gives him his $26k cut. Oddly, though Eddie decks one of Nick’s men en route, there’s no confrontation at the airport because Nick can’t imagine he’d take him to the airport. The confrontation takes place at Eddie’s apartment. Nick says Eddie now owes him $75k, but Eddie goes “Oh yeah, what if I tell the public what I know about you?,” and Nick goes “Oh yeah, then you're future ain't worth 26 cents.” But then he and his men just leave. Which is when Nick sits down and begins to write:

THE HARDER THEY FALL
The boxing business must rid itself of the evil influence of racketeers and crooked managers, even if it takes an Act of Congress to do it.

Yeah, not much of a lede.

This actually feels like the real drama of the movie—Eddie risking his life to tell the truth—but it’s where the movie leaves us. And it’s where we leave Humphrey Bogart for the final time: a lone man pecking away at a typewriter, his wife serving him coffee, as he rails against the kind of corrupt man he portrayed throughout the 1930s.

Here's looking at you, kid.

Our last glimpse of Bogie on a movie screen.

WARNING: SPOILERS

Is this Edward G. Robinson’s last gangster role? He played a couple of Big Jims in the 1960s: Big Jim Riva in an episode of “The Detectives” and Big Jim Stevens in a cameo in “Robin and the 7 Hoods.” And of course there was Dathan, governor of Goshen, in “The Ten Commandments,” who, as Billy Crystal reminds us, was a little too gangsterish. But in terms of the classical gangster, the genre he helped create with “Little Caesar” in 1931, I think this was the real end of Rico.

What a way to go out. Robinson plays Vincent Canelli, a brutal gang boss in prison, and a day from going to the chair for his sins. Except he’s got a plan, see?

Actually, as B-movie plans go, it’s not bad:

• His gang, including one-time moll Hatti (Jean Parker), kidnaps Ellen (Sylvia Findley), the grown-up daughter of a benevolent prison guard, whom they then blackmail into planting a gun under a chair in the death-row visitors gallery
• Then they kidnap a journalist, Carson (Jack Kelly), assigned to the execution and replace him with one of their own: Joey (Warren Stevens)
• Joey grabs the gun, and he and Canelli make a break

They also take the death-row inmates, including his partner Peter Manning (Peter Graves)—who knows less where the bodies are buried than where the money is hidden—along with hostages: the prison priest (Milburn Stone), prison doctor (Vic Perrin), and a nasty guard who will get his. Plus they still have the reporter and the daughter. Quite a picnic.

Except the other death-row inmates are dropped off off on a street corner without a plan. They’re pawns in Canelli’s game, since they give the cops something to do besides chase him. Smart. But in the getaway Manning gets shot, he’s the one guy Canelli needs alive, so they hole up in a warehouse where tensions mount. Can Manning pull through? (Yes) Will the guard survive Canelli’s brutality? (No) Will romance develop between Ellen and the reporter? (I think?)

Canelli winds up pushing Manning too quickly. Against the doc’s advice, Manning goes to a bank to retrieve the dough, which is in a safe-deposit box, but he winds up bleeding over a newspaper account of the prison break—altering the cops. The trail of blood leads to the warehouse, which is surrounded. But Canelli, in classic fashion, won’t be taken alive, see? One wonders which less-sadistic gangmember—Joey or Manning—will take matters into their own hands. 

I saw “Black Tuesday” as part of the SIFF Noir fest this year, and then bad shit happened afterwards and I lost the thread of the review. Apologies. Main thoughts: the movie is never dull, and it’s over too soon. If Hitchcock ripped the Band-Aid off, this one took some skin with it.

It’s also another of those ’50s movies (see: “Illegal”) that marries a 1930s star with actors who will become very familiar on 1960s television. We get not only “Mission: Impossible”’s Jim Phelps and “Gunsmoke”’s Doc, but The Professor (Russell Johnson) and Chief O’Hara (Stafford Repp). And Warren Stevens was in everything: “Twilight Zone,” “Have Gun, Will Travel,” “Rat Patrol” and “Star Trek”—Rojan in “By Any Other Name.”

Final thought: Peter Graves was a looker when he was young. Burroughs Elementary, represent.

WARNING: SPOILERS

Is there a better 1950s B-movie beginning than busty blonde Bonnie Parker (Dorothy Provine) disrobing down to her slip to a jangling rock ‘n’ roll beat? The opening credits are on the left, and we see her through a window on the right—with a swinging light above her, lockers behind her, and a bored expression on her face. Where is she? Turns out getting ready to work at a diner in Oklahoma City in 1932. Basically we’re peeping toms. B movies sell sex and boom here it already is.

I remember being surprised—about 25 years ago—when I found out there’d been another “Bonnie & Clyde” released about 10 years before the famous Beatty-Dunaway version, but the real surprise, now that I think about it, is that there was just the one. The Bonnie and Clyde story is made for exploitation. It’s got built-in sex, violence and rebellion, and the majority of it can be filmed in the hinterlands, where it’s cheap to film. Shouldn’t they have made more of them?

He's my all
The focus with this one, as the title implies, is on Bonnie. Clyde isn’t even Clyde. He’s Guy Barrow, with Jack Hogan doing a kind of Elvis Presley thing: anachronistic sideburns, Tupelo twang. If you think of him as Elvis and Provine as Jayne Mansfield, it’s an ultimate 1950s oomph matchup.

Parker is played as a bit of a sneering harridan. All the men make a play for her, and she belittles them all, calling them small-timers. She’s the force behind everything, the will, and does a lot of the killing. She’s a very, very bad person. Then, oddly, near the end, she gets religion in a way that nice guys everywhere will shake their heads over.

A nice guy named Paul (William Stevens), you see, asks to borrow her phone but doesn’t give her the once-over or get too close or sloppy. The opposite. He’s simply phoning a sick friend to let him know the reading assignments. Bonnie assumes he’ a teacher but he’s a night-school student looking to become an architect, and he explains what that is without patronizing her. He’s not just nice but down-to-earth, and the movie implies he’s the chance she blew. Later, when Guy tells her she’s lost her nerve, she responds, “I didn't lose my nerve, I know right where I left it,” and you get the feeling it’s here, talking with Paul, particularly when her dying words are “Paul … Paul…”—which the cops mishear as “Guy… Guy…” He was her potential redemption, the movie implies. Of course, by then, she’d killed nearly a dozen people, some in cold blood, but what the hey. Give a girl a chance.

The filmmakers muck with the history of course. I didn’t know, or I’d forgotten, that the real Bonnie Parker was married before—to Roy Thornton, a burglar—but here he’s named Duke Jefferson (Richard Bakalyan) and doing 175 years in federal prison for murder. The real Bonnie never saw hubby again after 1929 but this Bonnie helps Duke break out of prison—not for anything romantic, mind you, but to help them rob banks. Is it awkward, this threesome? Naw. By this point, Bonnie is cold to Guy, too. Early on, the two go at it hot and heavy but that ends abruptly. Not sure why. Other than him being small-time.

Wasn’t his brother a bigger deal in real life? Here, he’s named Chuck rather than Buck—and played by Joe Turkel, everyone’s favorite bartender in “The Shining”—but he’s barely in it. He and wifey show up at Bonnie and Guy’s ranch house, unknowingly bringing the cops along. After they shake them, the four camp out in the woods, but the cops find them there, too, and, blam, there goes Chuck. He doesn’t pull even one job with his brother.

Frank Hamer? He’s Tom Steel (Douglas Kennedy), forthright, sharp, and right on their heels from the beginning. But they slip through his clutches twice, and then he’s MIA, and then he shows up in the final reel for the big blowout. So odd. He’s supposed to be the hero but the movie makes him look rather incompetent.

Cuckoo’s nest
Other odd choices. It has them dying on June 6, 1934, rather than May 23, 1934. Didn’t writer Stanley Shpetner and director William Witney have an encyclopedia? A local library? Or were they trying to avoid a copyright lawsuit?

Even so, for what it is, a drive-in movie from American International, it’s not bad. We get a few surprising, sharp moments and some not-bad dialogue. I like the kid sticking them up. There’s a fun bit with hiking boy scouts coming across their path whose comical, portly scoutmaster seemed familiar to me. Turns out it's Sydney Lassick, good ol' Charlie Cheswick from “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” making his screen debut. Nice to see you, Cheswick.

Production-wise, they don’t do a poor job of it, either. One wonders how they afforded all those 1930s cars and then you do the math: It’s just 24 years prior. It would be like us doing a movie set in 2000. That seems shocking to me. From 1934 to 1958, we extracted ourselves from the Great Depression, went through World War II, entered the atomic age and the Cold War era, and went faster than the speed of sound. We went into outer space. What’s happened since 2000? Yes, 9/11 and COVID, but both led to backbiting and/or problematic policies. Mostly our phones got smarter and we got dumber.

Talkin' tomato juice. The guy on the left was supposed to be a different color until Jack Warner intervened.

WARNING: SPOILERS

This was James Cagney’s last Warner Bros. film. Well, this or “Starlift,” in which he plays himself in a cameo. The two were filmed concurrently—May to July 1951—but this one was released first. Cagney did make a few films in the 1950s distributed by Warners (“A Lion Is In the Streets,” “Mister Roberts”), but Warners was never the production company. He made movies produced by MGM and Universal, and by a host of independents, but as a freelancer in the ’50s he mostly steered clear of the studio that made him a star, and with whom he had a famously tumultuous relationship.

One wonders if the roommate was the last straw.

“Come Fill the Cup” is based on a 1951 novel by Harlan Ware, a Chicago newspaper man (Cagney couldn’t get away from Chicago newspaper men, could he?); and in the novel, and in the original script by Ben Roberts and Ivan Goff, the guy who helps the protagonist sober up—who saves him, basically—is Black. Per Cagney biographer John McCabe: 

Cagney thought this was a particularly striking aspect of the novel; he had personally witnessed and resented ongoing prejudice against black vaudeville performers. When Roberts and Goff turned in a script that retained Dolan’s blackness, Jack Warner was upset. He told Goff, “You think Cagney’s gonna be under the same roof as a nigger?”

So there went that.

At the same time, there is something in the character, Charley Dolan, that feels like how well-meaning white people, and white Hollywood in particular, portrayed Black people back then. It’s not quite Magic Negro stuff, but…

1. Dolan seems to have no life outside of the protagonist, Lew Marsh
2. Dolan takes on the female role—cooking and maintaining the house—while Marsh works
3. He’s the butt of an ongoing comic relief bit: trying to make tomato juice taste like something besides tomato juice
4. White people cause his death but he forgives all

So even if the role went to a Black actor, it would still feel a little problematic to modern audiences.

That said, James Gleason does a fine job with it. And Jack Warner is still a schmuck.

Flamboyant rogues
“Come Fill the Cup” is not only Cagney’s last starring role with Warners, it’s the last Cagney film I needed to complete the canon. How about that? There’s some side stuff to pick up—that one film he directed, ’50s TV episodes, “Terrible Joe”—and I’ll probably re-do “Angels With Dirty Faces” (my review is nearly a quarter-century old), but every one of his 62 feature films has now been viewed and reviewed. Made it, ma!

“Cup” was last because it was impossible to find—no streaming, no DVD—but it might’ve been near the end anyway. Movies about addiction are tough rows for me. The trajectory is always down, down, down,and the questions are always the same. Does he recover? When does he hit bottom? What does he ruin in the process?

The answers here come quickly but not glibly. Marsh ruins himself and begins recovery in 10-15 minutes of screentime, but the ruin is rough and the recovery haunted. “You’ve an incurable disease,” the doctor at the sanatorium tells him. “Liquor is as poisonous to you as sugar is to the man with diabetes. The only sure treatment is to quit. … The one drink you don’t take is that first one. Forever.”

What made Marsh hit bottom? He was a successful reporter who lost his job, his girl, and any semblance of dignity—begging for a quarter on a weekday morning to get another drink, and then falling into the street in front of an oncoming truck—but none of that was what turned him around. “It was a sound that made me quit,” he tells Charley Dolan. “As I was lying there in the gutter, where you saw me, it kept coming at me like an animal—a whirring sound.”

Dolan nods. “Angel feathers,” he says. It’s a repeated line.

Dolan is the last guy Marsh tried to bum a quarter off of, and he’s waiting for him when he gets out of the sanitarium. He was an alcoholic, too, and he keeps a bottle of whiskey in the cabinet above the sink less as temptation than reminder. He offers Marsh a place to stay, gets him a job on a construction crew, encourages him to get back into the reporting biz. Then we get a montage of newspaper headlines welcoming the new year: 1946 … 1947 … 1948 … We pick up the story again in 1951, by which point Marsh is a tough but sympathetic city editor at the Sun-Herald who’s hired back several ex-drunks, all of whom are doing well. He seems to be forever rushing forward, trying to stay one step ahead of that first drink.

So what’s the conflict now? Where’s the drama?

Well, the publisher of the newspaper is a bit of an idiot. John Ives is supposed to be a flamboyant rogue, and apparently they wanted Adolphe Menjou but he wasn’t available. Raymond Massey is “a fine actor,” says Cagney, but not exactly flamboyant. Both Cagney and McCabe thought it didn’t work but I’d say it doesn’t not work. Ives comes off as thick—default mode for rich people running things. 

Ives’ nephew, Boyd Copeland (Gig Young), is flamboyant. He’s an alcoholic music composer, in the process of ruining his life and marriage to Paula (Phyllis Thaxter), and Ives wants Marsh to set Boyd straight like with the other ex-drunks on staff. Marsh insists it doesn’t work that way, but Ives won’t listen. And Ives keeps not listening. Does he even know Marsh is Paula’s ex? Would he care? Marsh supposedly still has a candle burning for Paula, but I get those late-Cagney vibes of not being particularly interested in that aspect of the story. At best, his passion would exhibit itself in a pat on the cheek and let’s get on with the story, shall we?

Marsh is flown in a private plane to Ives’ estate, where he witnesses various toxic relationships: Boyd’s smothering mother, everyone ignoring the problem. He’s up-front about it. He calls Boyd “Boyd-y,” which Boyd can’t stand, and Boyd calls Marsh “Senor,” which Marsh never mentions. The back-and-forth between the two is good. Boyd is living life with a smiling drunken shrug, while Marsh stands back in that Cagney manner, almost on his toes, ready to take him on. But then Boyd splits, and Ives insists Marsh track him down. “I make you fully responsible!” he thunders. “You owe me this, Lewis!” 

Which … no? It’s a bit weird. Marsh could just leave the Sun-Herald and go to another paper, right? But he has his own shrug here—a repeated line: “You pay, and you pay, and you pay.” I.e., for alcoholism. And this is part of that. Even though it isn’t.

You know what their relationship is like? Cagney and Jack Warner. Warner had stupid ideas that Cagney was forced to go along with because he was under contract. One wonders if Cagney wanted Menjou for Ives because Menjou is closer to Warner. Right down to the moustache.

The other stupid idea Jack Warner demanded is the inclusion of a gangster, which wasn’t in the novel, but which he wanted for a Cagney flick. So in the rewrite, Maria (Charlita), the nightclub singer Boyd is seeing, is also moll to local gangster Lennie Garr (Sheldon Leonard). That’s the drama in the second half: saving Boyd not only from alcoholism but Lennie Garr. At one point, Marsh says this: 

You get to Lenny Garr. You tell him that the Sun-Herald is personally interested in the welfare of Boyd Copeland. Make it clear to the rat.

I love that Cagney is still saying “rat” in the 1950s. I’m also curious what Sheldon Leonard thought. Aside from playing bartenders like Nick in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” gangsterism was his default role. He’d done it many times before, but never in front of one of cinema’s ur-gangsters. What was that like?

At this point our questions are: Will Paula divorce Boyd and wind up with Marsh? No. But Charley does figure out the ingredient to make tomato juice taste like something else: mustard. Unfortunately, Marsh also sends him to pick up Boyd at the nightclub, and for some reason Boyd drives, and he’s speeding, and it’s raining. The real issue, though, is the brake line: It’s been cut by one of Garr’s men. Boyd survives the crash (“Heaven takes care of drunks and children,” Marsh says later), but not Charley. “I can hear the angel feathers, Lew,” he tells Marsh. “This time, there’s nothing I can do about it.” 

Afterwards, we get a remarkable scene. With tears in his eyes, Marsh confronts Boyd. He slaps him, and keeps slapping him, saying this all the while: 

You can’t buy your way out of this Boyd-y. You can’t bury your head in Mama’s lap and forget it. Not this time, Boyd-y. Charley’s there and you’re here, and it oughta be the other way around!

He seems lost, unhinged, with Cagney making that ng ng guttural sound he made when he found out his mom had died in “White Heat.” It’s powerful stuff. It’s also the moment Marsh almost falls off the wagon. At work, he sees the bar across the street, turns away, turns back. He goes in, orders a bourbon. He stares at it, raises it. Then our deus ex machina: a colleague races in to tell him about the punctured hole in the brake line. And off they go.

Now it becomes a split film: Boyd drying out and the Sun-Herald taking on the mob with misleading headlines about a fingerprint on the brake line. The final confrontation takes place at Boyd’s high-rise apartment. Marsh wants the missing Maria to talk, she agrees, but then Garr and henchman show up, guns drawn, and in Leonard’s “Guys and Dolls” voice he tells them the whole plan. They’re going to throw Maria out the window and leave Boyd and Marsh drunk with bottles strewn around to take the blame. Of course Marsh gets the upper hand, justice prevails, Paula chooses Boyd, etc. 

Two Cohans
We do get a nice bookending scene. At the beginning of the movie, Marsh is hanging at the bar across the street when Paula shows up.

Paula: Let me take you home.
Marsh: Don’t you see, Paula? I am home.

The movie’s final scene takes place at the newspaper office.

Ives: Can I drop you at your home?
Marsh: Don’t see you, Mr. Ives? I am home.

That’s not bad for a so-so movie.

This is the period when Cagney always seemed to be a few beats behind: a pre-WWII movie released at the end of World War II; an OSS movie a year after “O.S.S.”; a take on Huey Long four years after “All the King’s Men”; and here, a take on alcoholism six years after “The Lost Weekend.” 

“Cup” was directed by Gordon Douglas, who got his start with Hal Roach, went over to RKO, then landed at Warners in 1950. He directed the sci-fi classic “Them!” and a slew of forgettable tough guy flicks (tail-end Sinatra) in the ’60s. His only other Cagney is “Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye,” an underrated gangster movie. Gig Young did get a supporting Oscar nom here, his first of three. And … holy shit, the kid who plays the copy boy, the one who reluctantly cleans out Marsh’s desk at the beginning? Henry Blair, who played George M. Cohan, age 7, in “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” How great is that? The two Cohans even get a scene together.

WARNING: SPOILERS

Edward G. Robinson plays a district attorney who convicts “Star Trek”’s Dr. McCoy (DeForest Kelley) of murder, then finds evidence he was innocent but is too late to stop the execution. He descends into booze, loses his job to “Get Smart”’s Chief (Edward Platt), loses his girl to “Another World”’s Jim Mathews (Hugh Marlowe), but with the help of his assistant, Grandma Walton (Ellen Corby), takes on the bad guys, including Roger Manning, Space Cadet (Jan Merlin), and saves the day.

You get the idea. “Illegal” was a cheap B picture made at the fulcrum of old movies and new television.

It doesn’t speak much of new television. Or it speaks to something odd in the culture—that the dynamic, ethnic heroes of Warner Bros.’s early talkies (Robinson, whose ethnicity kept shifting; Cagney, whose ethnicity didn’t), were replaced by dull WASPs—that mid-century, “FBI”ish thing. Do we blame Joseph Breen and the PCA for pushing us in this direction or is it what we wanted? Either way, it's Robinson, licking his wounds after HUAC and trying not to fall too far, and the others trying to hold onto their rung of the ladder and possibly ascend. This is where they meet. 

“Illegal” is also the debut, or near-debut, of Jayne Mansfield. She’s the moll, but smart, and piano-playing, and the final surprise witness. She’s definitely doing Marilyn but she’s not full-on Jayne Mansfield yet. She seems like she might be a person.

Decking and drinking
Robinson plays Victor Scott, who crawled up from the gutter to become D.A. but then lost it all. It’s not just guilt over the death of “Bones”; it’s that, without prosecution he doesn’t know what to do. He’s not really interested in corporate law and/or the corporate types shun him. It’s not until he winds up in court on a drunk and disorderly and hears a man pleading his innocence that the light bulb goes on: Oh right, I could be a criminal defense attorney. The most obvious path from prosecution.

As such, we see him get clients off by: 1) literally decking a witness, and 2) literally drinking poison, which is Exhibit A in the case. He pretends it’s not poison, but it is, just slow-acting, so when the prosecution asks for a recess to regroup, he goes to get his stomach pumped. But … I don’t know. Destroying evidence? And doesn’t this mean his client was guilty?

The girl he loses early, his former assistant, is Ellen Miles, played by Nina Foch, who played the rich bitch in “An American in Paris.” You know she wasn’t even 30 when that movie came out? Here, she’s the daughter of a judge whom Scott helped raise, and she has a thing for him despite this and the difference in their ages. Scott feels she’s better off elsewhere and pushes her into the arms of his assistant, Ray Borden (Marlowe), who winds up a crum-bum mole for the mob in the D.A.’s office. Plus he's a jerk of a husband. Plus he’s a jerk to Jayne Mansfield.

The second half of the movie is basically: Scott rises as a defense attorney while trying to steer clear of mob boss Frank Garland (Albert Dekker). At the same time, the new D.A., Ralph Ford (Platt), tries to find the leak in his office. Both come to a head when Ellen overhears her husband plotting with Garland, he hears that she overhears, and she has to kill him in self-defense. Sadly, District Attorney Ford is such an idiot he assumes Ellen was the leak, not Ray, and he puts her on trial for murder. So Scott has to defend her without implicating Garland.

That last part is silly, too, and goes away when Garland uses creepy hit man Andy Garth (Merlin) to try to off Scott, who winds up gut-shot but insists on calling surprise witness Angel O’Hara (Mansfield), who can testify that Ray called Garland a lot, including the night of his murder. And he was a jerk besides.

So the prosecution drops its case just in time for Scott to die on the courtroom floor. Mother of mercy, is this the end of Victor Scott? It is.

Stuff dreams are made of
Why “Illegal” as a title? I guess for the pulpiness of it. Probably should’ve had an exclamation point. That’s what the movie feels like. Like it makes up for its lack with SENSATIONALISM!

It was produced on the cheap by Frank Rosenberg, whose upcoming film, “Miracle in the Rain,” can also be spotted here on a movie marquee. What else can be spotted? Believe it or not, the Maltese Falcon—or a Maltese Falcon. It’s on the top shelf in a bookcase in the D.A.’s office. I guess because Warner Bros. needed to fill background? “What do we got in the prop closet?” “Well, it’s this or the letters of transit from 'Casablanca.'” Meanwhile, those Degas and Gauguin originals that Scott admires in Garland’s office are in fact Degas and Gauguin originals. They belonged to Robinson, an art lover, and he lent them to the production. I like that his character says “I’ve always had to content myself with reproductions” when they’re actually his.

Despite the cheapness, there’s still talent in the room. Max Steiner does the music, and the screenplay was co-written by W.R. Burnett, who wrote the original “Little Caesar,” as well as “High Sierra,” “The Asphalt Jungle” and even “The Great Escape.” Robinson is his usual professional self, while Jan Merlin impresses as the porkpie-hat wearing hit man. Something about his character just feels off. Like he could’ve played perverse Richard Widmark-type roles. Maybe he did.

The rest is a lot of bland WASPy stuff that will wind up on television. And Mansfield, the shape of things to come.

Just a knick-knack on the shelf. 

WARNING: SPOILERS 

“I believe that every time you remake a picture, there must be a specific reason why you do that,” producer Darryl Zanuck once said.

Zanuck had a specific reason for remaking “What Price Glory.” The 1926 original, based on a popular 1924 play, was from a previous era of filmmaking—silent and black-and-white, chiefly—and the remake would not only add color and sound but Technicolor and music. It would be a World War I musical. That was Zanuck’s specific reason for remaking it, and it was James Cagney’s specific reason for signing on. While the world thought him a gangster, he thought of himself an old hoofer, a song-and-dance man, and was too often stymied in this regard. Here was another chance.

Zanuck then hired screenwriters Phoebe and Henry Ephron, Nora’s parents, who wrote light comedy and romance. Then he hired John Ford to direct.

And there went that. 

Ford refused to make it a musical. And after his own experiences in World War II, he was more gung-ho about the military than the movie’s main characters. As for the original’s bawdiness? Right, Production Code. Out.

So what’s left? A broad comedy about two Marines in a French village who fight over a beautiful girl way above their pay grade—and neither realizes it—who then go to the front to fight pointlessly and allow a bit player to condemn them with a melodramatic speech that includes the title phrase.

A mess, in other words.

Nasty boys
I have to go over the age thing again. Sorry.

In the original, the actors who play the main characters, Flagg and Quirt (Victor McLaglen and Edmund Lowe), have 18 and 14 years, respectively, on the actress who plays Charmaine (Dolores del Rio). They’re 40 and 36, she’s 22. Here, Dan Dailey and Corinne Calvet are comparable—he’s 37, she’s 27—but Cagney is 53. He’s a quarter-century older than Calvet, not to mention overweight. And he’s running from her? In what universe? I guess Hollywood’s. 

The age difference also screws up the dynamic between Cagney’s Flagg and Dailey’s Quirt. They’re not contemporaries the way McLaglen and Lowe were. Put it this way: I bought the rivalry between McLaglen and Lowe. We get to see it develop. The original opens in Peking, China, where McLaglen’s Flagg has a girl, Shanghai Mary (Phyllis Haver), and Lowe’s Quirt steals her. Then we move on to the Philippines, where Flagg has a girl, Carmen (Elena Jurado), and Quirt steals her. And it’s only then, a quick 15 minutes in, that we wind up in a small French town with Capt. Flagg. Sgt. Quirt doesn’t show up for another half hour. So when he steals Flagg’s girl again, well, we get the joke. We know that Flagg is very strong and kind of sweet and not too smart, while Quirt is a bit of a grifter and a master of the sleight of hand—card tricks and coin tricks. He’s kinda handsome and good at stealing stuff. Particularly Flagg’s girl.

The remake gives us none of this past history. It begins in France, at about the 40-minute mark of the original, and Quirt has no card or coin tricks. He doesn’t seem particularly sharp, either; Flagg does. They’re just two guys who hate each other in cartoonish fashion. When Quirt shows up—reporting for duty and demanding a transfer in the same breath—they eye each other, smile, remove accoutrement, and mark an X on the floor with a piece of chalk. Then they spit on their hands and take up fighting positions. Flagg’s a foot shorter and 16 years older than Quirt but always manages to deck him. Because Cagney.

You know what they are? They’re just two nasty guys who think they’re cute. And Calvet’s Charmaine is way more innocent than del Rio’s. I love the way del Rio admires McLaglen’s shoulders and arms; I love her keyhole meeting with Lowe, and their behind-the-door romance. She’s got the female gaze, which was more prevalent pre-code. Calvet is a knockout, certainly, but mostly she just wants to get married. Because you know women. And Flagg and Quirt mostly don’t. Because you know men.

Has anyone done a deep dive into these characters? During war, they’re OK with each other but when things are OK they’re at war with each other. That’s the bit, and it’s a good one, but there’s something about their antagonism, and their competition over women without wanting the attachment of the woman, that feels ripe for modern study. Each so wants what the other has that one wonders if what they really want is each other. “Don’t fight,” Charmaine says at the end of the original. “You love each other, yes?” Yes.

The original was directed—extremely well—by Raoul Walsh, with John Ford shooting a few second-unit scenes that went uncredited. Twenty years later, in 1949, Ford decided to put on the original play to benefit the Purple Heart Association. Good cause. He cast Ward Bond as Flagg, Pat O’Brien as Quirt, and Maureen O’Hara as Charmaine. Good casting. He even managed to convince stars like John Wayne and Gregory Peck to appear as extras. But, per Pat O’Brien, “Ford was a lousy stage director,” and the play got middling reviews. Worse, it only raised a pittance for its cause. This was his third shot at the story and he blew it. Ford was a drunk and a bully, and that stuff often seeps into his movies. The drinking here is off the charts, and the comedy is awful. “[War] was my racket for a while,” Ford told Peter Bogdanovich in the early ’70s, “and there wasn’t anything funny about it.”

No shit. They do a prolonged bit with a bathing Flagg trying to explain “boots” to Charmaine’s father, Cognac Pete, who doesn’t get it until he realizes “Ah, les boots.” Not funny. When Flagg returns hungover from Paris, he has a subordinate slap him with a wet rag. “Harder!” he says. “Harder!” he says. Then: “Not that hard!” and repeatedly and angrily slaps the subordinate with it. Not funny. In the original, Flagg’s right-hand man is Pvt. Kiper (Ted McNamara), who is charged with finding out who keeps giving Flagg razzberries; in the end, Flagg realizes it’s Kiper. Ford loses all of this, casts the cantankerous William Demarest, age 60, as Corp. Kiper, whose bit is to keep asking if his discharge papers have come in yet. In the end, Flagg admits they arrived a year ago but he never told him. Does Kiper get mad? Having his commanding officer keep him at war for another year? No. When the men are called back to the front, he simply joins them. Because men. Because camaraderie.

Every change to the original feels wrong. The second-act wedding between Charmaine and Quirt—with Flagg laughing all the while—is called off by Charmaine in the ’26 version. “My heart is my own! I don’t sell it,” she says. In ’52, it’s called off by Quirt, who realizes they’re about to go to the front where Flagg will need his top sergeant, so there’s nothing Flagg can do. Charmaine? She just stands there, humiliated. In a broad sense, the story is about the switch from a pre-war professional army to a Great War citizen’s army, and in ’26 we see Flagg questioning men who were once painters and farmers and henpecked husbands. One of them, the painter, Pvt. Lewisohn (Barry Norton), is called a “mother’s boy,” but without the negative connotations we’d ascribe to it. He’s the one doomed to die, and near the end we get a poignant shot of Charmaine burying his mother’s letters with him. In the remake he’s played by a young Robert Wagner, whom Ford bullied on the set, calling him “Boob” rather than Bob, and apparently even decking him at one point. No Momma’s boy here. Instead, Lewisohn gets a starry-eyed, super-sappy romance with a French schoolgirl, Nicole (Marisa Pavan), that’s just painful to watch. In the original, they go to the front until they’re called back. The remake gives them a goal: If they can capture a German officer, they’ll get a month’s leave, and it’s Lewisohn who captures the officer. A second later, after a shell attack, he dies in Flagg’s arms. Back in the French town, Bar-Le-Duc, Flagg has to tell Nicole what happened. It’s more painful than the war scenes.

The original gave us trenches and gas warfare because it remembered what WWI was like. The remake has none of these. If generals fight the last war, directors often film the new one. Sometimes this works (Vietnam for Korea in “M*A*S*H”). Mostly it doesn’t. It doesn’t here.

Connect 4
A little history. I didn’t know any of this stuff when I first watched the Cagney version but I find it fascinating.

The ’26 version was so popular that it became one of the first films to foster sequels. In each, Flagg and Quirt travel the world to exotic places and fight over the latest sexy, exotic actress. For “The Cock-Eyed World” (1929), they go from Russia, to Brooklyn, to a South Seas island, where Lili Damita awaits. In “Women of All Nations” (1931), it’s Sweden, Nicaragua, Egypt, and Greta Nissen. By the time of “Hot Pepper” (1933), they’re ex-Marines, Quirt is a grifter, Flagg owns several nightclubs, and Lupe Velez is the object of their affection and argument. They even get their own catchphrase: “Sez you!” “Sez me!”

The authors of the original play, Maxwell Anderson and Laurence Stallings, deserve a biography of their own. Both were New York World journalists looking to make bigger names for themselves. Stallings was a former U.S. Marine who was wounded at the Battle of Belleau Wood and would later have his leg amputated. (Both legs, eventually.) He had plenty of stories to tell, Anderson listened and wrote them down, Stallings worked over scenes for authenticity. That’s how “What Price Glory?” happened. (Hollywood removed the question mark.) After it became a huge success, both men became go-to authorities on WWI. King Vidor’s “The Big Parade,” a huge hit in 1925, was adapted from Stallings’ 1924 autobiographical novel “Plumes,” with Stallings helping with the scenario. He also adapted Hemingway’s “A Farwell to Arms” to the stage in 1930. That same year, Anderson adapted “All Quiet on the Western Front” for the screen.

Most of Anderson’s work seems to have been in the theater. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1933 for “Both Your Houses,” a political drama, did a series of plays based on the Tudors, including “Anne of a Thousand Days,” and wrote, in blank verse, the play that became the Bogart-Bacall movie “Key Largo.” In 1925, after the success of “What Price Glory?,” he was putting on another play, “Outside Looking In,” based on the autobiography of writer-hobo Jim Tully*, which debuted in a small theater in Greenwich Village. It got good notices and moved uptown to a bigger theater. There, after the first act of the first performance, Anderson hurried backstage, gathered everyone around, and told them they needed to speak twice as loud and twice as fast for the bigger room. Then he eyed the actor playing Little Red, one of the leads: “Everybody, that is, except you.” That actor was James Cagney, and the part was one of his first big breaks. Anderson was also around at the end of Cagney’s career, writing the unproduced play that became “Never Steal Anything Small,” Cagney’s fourth-to-last starring role, and another movie that began with big musical dreams only to see them dwindle to a couple of odd numbers. 

(* More connections: Tully’s autobiography became the basis of a 1928 film, “Beggars of Life,” which was directed by William Wellman, who, three years later, with “The Public Enemy,” would make Cagney a star.)

If Anderson had Cagney connections, Stallings had Ford. His work in ’30s Hollywood ranged from Clark Gable newspaper romances to uncredited work on the Marx Bros.’ “At the Circus,” but he later became a Ford man, collaborating on “3 Godfathers,” “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon,” and “The Sun Shines Bright.” Not surprising. Ford liked to surround himself with ex-military. He also liked to take John Wayne down a peg for shirking duty during WWII. 

Another Ford man? Victor McLaglen. I’d love to see a good copy of the original “What Price Glory”—the one I watched was a blurry thing on the Internet Archive—but even through the blur I could tell how good McLaglen was. He was ex-British Army and a former professional heavyweight boxer who got into the movie biz by happenstance. They were looking for someone to play the lead in a boxing movie, he auditioned and got the part. This was in Britain. In the mid-20s, he moved to Hollywood, worked with John Ford, was a co-lead in the silent version of “Beau Geste,” then did “What Price Glory” and became big. I love how in the first sequel, which was a talking picture, they had to explain away his British accent, which, of course, nobody heard in the first feature.

McLaglen won his only Oscar in “The Informer,” directed by Ford in 1935, and garnered his second nomination—for supporting this time—in “The Quiet Man,” directed by Ford in 1952. He was in most of the Ford/John Wayne westerns of the late ’40s, too: “Fort Apache,” “She Wore A Yellow Ribbon,” “Rio Grande.” So why didn’t Ford cut him a cameo here? Too self-referential? Maybe. Or maybe Ford figured he was doing him a favor.

WARNING: SPOILERS

By my calculations, James Cagney died 14 times in the movies, and this is his final fall. He gets it in the hills of Ireland overlooking the ocean, at the hands of the young man he recruited to the cause. Fitting.

Follow-up question: How many of these deaths were by gun? In my memory, Cagney's always getting plugged and staggering along the streets before collapsing and expiring—like in “The Public Enemy.” Except … that happens there, sure, but it’s not what kills him. He winds up in the hospital, Schemer Burns’ gang kidnaps him, then delivers his mummified corpse to his family. I assume he’s plugged at the end of “He Was Her Man,” but that’s off-screen. “Angels with Dirty Faces”? Electric chair. “White Heat”? Explosion. I’ll cut to the chase. In his long, gangster-ridden career, Cagney is killed by guns only four times: “The Roaring Twenties” (by one of Bogie’s men), “Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye” (Barbara Payton, repeating the title line just before pulling the trigger), “A Lion Is In the Streets” (by his sister, Jeanne), and here, at the hands of Don Murray.

Cagney gets star billing but Murray is the leading man, Kerry O’Shea, an Irish-American who slowly gets swept up in the Irish fight for freedom in 1921. Cagney plays Dr. Sean Lenihan, a charming professor at the College of Surgeons, where O’Shea studies, who is secretly a revolutionary. He’s the last man standing in the IRA cause. Top of the world, pa.

Nah, nah, nah, nah … OK
It’s not a bad movie. The black-and-white photography and the framing are striking. Not sure who to credit. Michael Anderson directed, Erwin Hiller was cinematographer, and between them they have one Oscar nomination (Anderson), one BAFTA (Hiller), and not much else. The story, which tends toward melodrama, is from a 1934 novel by Rearden Conner, adapted by Marian Spitzer, while late-era Cagney writers Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts (“White Heat,” “Man of a Thousand Faces”) get writing credits.

It’s another late-era Cagney movie that begins with narration:

Dublin, 1921: a city at war. Often in its turbulent history, the men of Ireland had risen to fight for their freedom—only to be crushed. This was the year of total war. It was also the year of the Black and Tan, the army assembled to replace the English regulars, who had lost their taste for the suppression of men in search of freedom.

At this point, the camera settles onto a cemetery, where O’Shea is laying flowers at the grave of his mother. He nods as a contingent of mourners go by, but then the Black and Tans pull up, their casket is revealed to be full of weapons, and everyone scatters. O’Shea, questioned, has all the right answers—he’s innocent—then covers for a woman he knows is guilty. It was just an instinct, he tells his friend, Paddy Nolan (Ray McAnally).

Earlier I said O’Shea gets slowly swept up in the Irish cause, and boy does he ever. It takes half the movie.

Paddy starts the lobbying. They have expository dialogue about how O’Shea is a World War vet who’s seen enough violence, yadda yadda, but his heart is with Paddy’s cause. “Your heart’s not enough,” Paddy tells. That’s the main thing they talk about—recruiting O’Shea. At a pub, the Black and Tan come in and push people around. Does that turn him? Nah. On the way home, a revolutionary blows up a B&T transport and the street turns into a shooting gallery. That? Nope. O’Shea’s instinct is again to help, Paddy’s is to protect O’Shea, and Paddy is killed in the effort. Surely that? No, keeping going. By this point he’s already associated with the revolutionaries, so Lenihan brings him underground and make an offer: take a boat back to the states or fight. O’Shea, blank-faced: “I’ve done all the killing I intend to do.”

Now they’re off to a farm, where O’Shea is bullied by O’Brien (a young Richard Harris), charmed by Noonan (an excellent Cyril Cusack), and charmed again by Kitty (Glynis Johns), a bar maid and paramour of many of the revolutionaries, whom Lenihan doesn’t trust. The O’Brien scene isn’t bad. He questions O’Shea’s manhood, saying it won’t take more than a breath of wind to blow him over, then feints a blow. O’Shea stands firm, decks O’Brien and continues to declare his pacifism: “When that boat comes, I’ll be on it.” The Noonan scene isn’t bad, either. He’s a poet, whose calm appeals to O’Shea—and us. “Do you think I’m running out?” he wonders aloud. This fence-straddling continues until, because of a boob move by O’Brien, O’Shea is hauled away by the B&Ts, tortured by a Gestapo-looking Col. Smithson (Christopher Rhodes), and rescued by Lenihan. Then he finally joins the cause. To celebrate, he grabs Kitty and makes out with her. As one does.

By this point, the sympathetic Lady Fitzhugh (Sybil Thorndike) has been imprisoned and is on a hunger strike, so, as potential exchange, Lenihan kidnaps the daughter of the adviser to the military governor, Jennifer Curtis (Dana Wynter), who just happens to be young and beautiful, with a long, lovely neck. Of course she and O’Shea are attracted to each other. (Whither Kitty?) All the while, Lenihan is revealing himself to be more and more radical. A chance for peace but without a republic? Never! On the beach he actually chokes Kitty and throws her onto the sand—continuing Cagney’s onscreen violence against women that began with Mae Clarke and a grapefruit 30 years earlier. Then they all go to the dock to assassinate Col. Smithson.

Except Kitty’s there, too. She’s been fingered to the B&T, doesn’t think she’d stand up to torture, and has booked passage to Liverpool. Questioned by the cops, she spots O’Brien and panics; the B&Ts see that, give O’Brien chase, and Lenihan thinks she ratted them out. In the ensuing gun battle, O’Brien, shooting two-fisted and ham-fisted, is killed, Lenihan kills Kitty in cold blood, and O’Shea goes into the drink. Back at the lighthouse, we get one of the oddest transitions I’ve ever seen—like something out of an SNL skit. They’re counting their dead, everyone is somber, and the man standing behind O’Shea says, “Yes, it’s bad,” somberly. Then his face suddenly brightens. “But it’s all over now!” Because of the peace treaty. I burst out laughing.

Even as the General (Michael Redgrave), a Michael Collins figure, heads to London to negotiate, Lenihan fights on. Lady Fitzhugh has died? Well, then he’s doing to kill Jennifer! Rather than shoot her in her room, though, he takes her to a picturesque bluff overlooking the ocean, which of course allows O’Shea to follow, and challenge him and shoot him. Since this is a late ’50s indie movie, we get one more melodramatic flourish: After cradling the head of the man whose life he took, O’Shea, our antiviolent hero, looks at the gun with disgust and chucks it over the cliff. Cut to: a closeup of the gun in the sand as the surf comes in. Fin.

Bad company
Again, parts aren’t bad. Not sure how you make O’Shea’s fence-sitting more interesting but they don’t manage it. Maybe Murray wasn’t actor enough. Cagney’s lilt tends to leave him when Lenihan is angry, which is most of the second half of the movie, and his sudden fury at all the pretty women is inexplicable. (I kept wondering if he was a closeted homosexual.) Harris is good, if a bit too 1950s Method, while his character is such a fuckup as to be comic: He challenges O’Shea and loses, brings a gun to a stakeout when told not to, and blurts out Lenihan’s identity in front of a hostage, forcing O’Shea to kill the man. He makes no right move. I loved Cyril Cusack. Don’t know how you act calm and wise but he did. I wanted to keep hanging with the guy.

The posters are abysmal. That odd sketch of Cagney with gun in hand and scarf flying? It’s both cheap and makes him look way older than his 60 years. Can’t imagine the marketing discussions. “Hmm, not quite right. What if we turn him blue and add a photo of Glynis Johns in a bathing suit at his feet? There, perfect.” The movie entered the public domain a while ago so it’s been abused in the usual fashion. The only DVD available is in the wrong aspect ratio and is part of a four-part Shout Factory “Action-Adventure Movie Marathon,” along with a 1970s Roger Corman exploitation flick, a cheap Indian Jones ripoff, and a forgettable early ’80s actioner. Deserves better company.

The title, by the way, is the first part of an old Irish saying: “Shake hands with the devil and you’ll never get it back.” Cagney was excited to do it, his first and only movie in Ireland, and was, by all accounts, his usual self: a charming, down-to-earth raconteur on the set, a faraway fella off it. Others went for pints, he went home. Not counting “Ragtime,” it’s his third-to-last movie. He was a movie-a-year guy by this time. He was sitting in the exit row.

WARNING: SPOILERS

This was James Cagney’s second western. His first, The Oklahoma Kid in 1939, caused laughter in some quarters for two reasons: Cagney was so obviously a city kid (except at heart) and he wasn’t exactly John Wayne in stature. Even co-star Humphrey Bogart took a potshot. Cagney in his 10-gallon hat, he said, looked like a mushroom.

Fifteen years later, no one said boo because now it worked: Cagney's face was craggy, his body beefy. He looked like someone who spent a great deal of time outdoors—which he had, as a gentleman farmer in Martha’s Vineyard. Maybe to a fault? His 18-month hiatus between A Lion Is In the Streets and this movie is his longest time away from the screen since becoming a star in 1931, and he’d developed a bit of a paunch.

Cagney was drawn to the project by the director (Nicholas Ray), the script (Winston Miller and the team of Harriet Frank, Jr. and Irving Ravetch), and the location shooting (Silverton, Colorado, amid the Rockies). He had high hopes. They were dashed.

We had tried to make as offbeat a Western as possible, but whoever cut the film was evidently revolted by anything but clichés. As a consequence, little things that the director, Nick Ray (a good man), and the actors put in to give the story extra dimension were excised very proficiently. The result was just another programmer.

Yet Run for Cover isn’t bad. It begins well, sags in the middle, then includes a kind of Mexican-standoff ending that surprises and delights.

Forgiveness cycle
Alright, so it begins cheesy. Over the opening credits announcing VistaVision! and Technicolor, we hear a happy, all-male chorus singing the movie’s title song:

Head for the hills hit the trail
When trouble’s on the run
(Run for cover)
Don’t find yourself locked in jail
For something you ain’t done
(Run for cover)
(Run for cover)
(Run for cover)
(Ai-ay)

Yeah. Not good.

At this point, we see great Technicolor shots of Colorado and eventually a dusty Matt Dow (Cagney) riding his beautiful pinto horse to a mountain stream, where he’s set to wash his face and fill his canteen. Then he spins, gun drawn, eyes flashing, as Davey Bishop (John Derek) rides into the clearing. It leads to an odd standoff. With the gun drawn on him, Davey is calm and smiling; as soon as it’s holstered his face crumbles into a pout. Even after Matt apologizes, Davey keeps complaining, and they only get past the moment when Matt defuses the situation with a Billy the Kid reference. All that should’ve been a warning.

Going in the same direction, they ride together, and await a passing train by taking shots at a hawk circling overhead. Two men on the train misinterpret their actions and panic. They’d been robbed the month before—one man still wears a bandage around his head—and thinking the gunshots are signals, and wanting no part of a second robbery, they toss out the town’s payroll bag. Matt, who’d just spent six years in prison for a case of mistaken identity, immediately knows they’re screwed, but he and Davey ride toward town to give the money back. Halfway there, they’re ambushed by the sheriff and his posse, who are about to lynch Matt when a wounded Davey is recognized and tempers subside. They send Davey to a nearby farm while they bring Matt back to the sheriff’s office to face his accusers. I like how Cagney immediately reclaims moral authority here. “What did you tell these people?” he demands of the payroll men. “Let me hear what said to them!” These guys reveal themselves to be boobs, as does the sheriff, and Matt storms off to the Swenson farm to see if Davey is OK.

Let’s pause a moment to consider his actions here. Why go to the Swenson farm? He’s been with Davey a few hours at best. They got off on the wrong foot, then stumbled into disaster. Why not keep riding? Particularly since Matt was riding toward the town to see if it was a place worth settling in, and his near-lynching gave him the answer.

Bit by bit, though, we find out the following: 1) Matt feels guilty because he told Davey to ride first, maybe knowing he’d be shot first; and 2) Matt lost a son who would’ve been about Davey’s age. Is that reason enough? Meh. The bonus is Helga Swenson (Viveca Lindfors), your typical beautiful Swede working the farm with her taciturn father (Jean Hersholt, of the humanitarian award, in his final film role), and with nary a suitor nearby. Matt isn’t even one, initially. He’s more worried about Davey than interested in pursuing Helga, which might be why she’s attracted to him. Either way, she does most of the heavy lifting, while Matt frets and carps over Davey: “What kind of doctor are you? Can’t even fix a broken leg!” he says at one point. “What makes you so sure now? You were wrong once before!” he says later.

Davey survives but with a lifelong limp, and Matt spends the rest of the movie propping him up. When Matt becomes sheriff, he makes Davey his deputy. When the townspeople ignore Davey to lynch a bank robber, and Davey pouts and turns in his badge, Matt gives it back. Then he lets Davey take the second bank robber, Morgan (Ernest Borgnine), to the next county seat, but Davey can’t do this, either. Morgan gets away. Chance after chance Davey gets, and he always blows it. It gets old. Derek’s pout really gets old.

Then on Easter Sunday the robbers return in force, led by Gentry (Grant Withers), who, it turns out, was Matt’s cellmate back in the day. This is how the townspeople find out about Matt’s past, so even as Matt gathers a posse to catch Gentry and his men, they remain suspicious. But at the last moment, Davey rides up, announcing, with bravado, “Looks like you could use a deputy.” We think: Hey, is this when Davey redeems himself? Once they reach Comanche territory, the townsfolk balk and return to safety, while Matt keeps going with Davey. We think: Hey, is this when Davey redeems himself?

Nope. Riding through a windstorm, Davey shoots Matt. In the process, Davey is spilled from his horse, and Matt, winged, kicks his gun away.

Matt: Why did you do that? Tell me why?
Davey: You wouldn’t quit. There was no other way of stopping you.
Matt: Stop me from what?
Davey: From catching Gentry … finding out I was in on it.
Matt: You … with THEM?

First, I love the reading Cagney gives that top line. There’s no anger, just bewilderment. But yes, the little shit’s a traitor. Morgan never overpowered him; that’s when Davey joinedthe gang. He even gave them the idea of Easter Sunday, when all the townsfolk would be in church. Matt adds: “All except Pa Swenson,” who was killed while the men were fleeing. But even here, even with blood on his hands, Davey’s a little shit about it. “What was I supposed to do: Hobble up and down a hardware counter for the rest of my life? For $8.00 a week?”

Throughout, Matt has tried to impart wisdom to Davey. When Davey learns he’ll never walk right again, Matt says this: “Lots of fellows live and die without ever having to find out how much of a man they are. You could be as good a man as anybody in town.” That's pretty good. And after they find Gentry and the other men killed by Comanches, grab the money, and get ready to return home, Matt tells him this:

There's a lot of people in this world who've had a tougher time than you or me. It comes with the ticket. Nobody guarantees you a free ride. The only difference is: Most people don’t run for cover. They keep right on going, picking up the pieces the best way they can.

There’s our title reference, oddly in the negative. Meaning everything the title song trumpets is the opposite of the way the hero actually thinks. We should really be watching a movie called Don’t Run for Cover.

Amazingly, after all this, Matt still gives Davey another chance. No one in town knows Davey betrayed them and caused the death of Pa Swenson, Matt says, so why not just keep that part quiet and Davey can resume his normal life? Davey just looks at him, stunned. It’s the one moment we identify with him; we’re stunned, too. But before anything else can happen, they hear Comanches nearby, hide until dark, and try to ford a river to safety. “I can’t make it,” Matt says, gasping in the deep water. “Help me back.”

We think: Hey, is this when Davey redeems himself?

Nope. He tries to drown Matt.

You gotta give the filmmakers credit for persistence. They keep playing the same off-key notes of the forgiveness cycle—screw-up, forgiveness, betrayal; screw-up, forgiveness, betrayal—and we keep hoping for a shift near the end, an upbeat note, a moment when the forgiveness actually works. 

But here’s the great thing about this movie: Just when we’re not expecting it, the moment we don’t think, “Hey, is this when Davey redeems himself?,” Davey redeems himself.

One-offs
After the near drowning, Matt clings to a log and floats downriver, then walks back to their camp for the stashed payroll. On his way to town, still wounded, he stumbles upon an old abandoned fort/mission, which turns out to be the gang’s hideout; Davey’s there with Morgan. Matt shoots Morgan, then he and Davey have it out. Davey accuses Matt of preaching and Matt says that a preacher’s “gotta they’re some good about everybody. But there’s no more good in you than in a rattlesnake.” He’s finally done with him. No more forgiveness. I assume he’s going to take him back to town for a trial and a hanging.

Except Morgan’s not dead. And as he crawls to his gun and aims it at Matt, Davey sees, draws and fires. Except Matt thinks Davey is drawing on him, so he shoots Davey. Only after the fact does he realize Davey was saving his life. He kills Davey for saving his life.

And like that, we go from being bored to being floored.

Is there a musical term for this? Playing the same notes forever until you veer off suddenly, unexpectedly? It’s so beautifully done. The one who always betrays proves loyal, while the one who always forgives punishes a moral act.

The movie then does two more things—one right, one sadly wrong. The right thing is they don’t give Davey any dying words. He just stares up, rolls his eyes back, dies. The wrong thing is the happy ending. In this era of the blacklist, no western, it seemed, had townspeople worth a damn. Here, too. They want law but take it into their own hands; they want Matt but never trust him. In the end, when Matt returns, wounded, exhausted, he’s met on the outskirts of town by these same chuckleheads still suspicious of him. Fed up, he tosses them the money, says “Compliments of Davey,” then dismounts and hugs Helga. Then the townspeople ride past and Matt gives them the finger.

Kidding. They ride past, waving, and, as the music wells, Matt waves back. All is well. The End.

Wait, what? Shouldn’t he be throwing his badge in the dirt or something? Or showing remorse? The pain he’ll feel the rest of his life—knowing he took the life of his prodigal son for saving his own?

In the 1950s Cagney worked with some great directors but never on any great movies. Indeed, he often starred in the one before their great one. Mister Roberts began with John Ford at the helm until Ford was kicked off; then Ford went and made The Searchers. Tribute to a Bad Man was directed by Robert Wise, who then directed Somebody Up There Likes Me. As for Nicholas Ray? His next pic was a little something called Rebel Without a Cause.

Hey, can you imagine James Dean as Davey? That might've worked. At the least, it would’ve saved us from John Derek. The rest of the cast is good anyway. Lindfors is a nice mix of Hollywood beauty and maybe, potentially—if you squint hard enough—a hardscrabble frontierwoman. The worst of the townspeople, Larsen, is played by longtime character actor Jack Lambert, who has the deepest of voices and thinnest of eyes. Fun fact: 10 years later, he wound up in an episode of The Andy Griffith Show in a jail cell with Billy Halop of the Dead End Kids, whom Cagney befriended in Angels with Dirty Faces. (I might have to watch that episode.) Grant Withers is another actor with Cagney history. A big name in the early 1930s—he scandalously eloped with a 17-year-old Loretta Young in 1930—he starred in two of the first movies Cagney appeared in: Sinners’ Holiday and Other Men’s Women. While Cagney rose, Withers fell into character acting and hard times. Drink, mostly. He killed himself in 1959, age 54. He’s good here. I like that he plays a man who knew Cagney way back when, since he did.

There's also Borgnine, seventh-billed, who this same year would star in Marty and win the Academy Award for best actor. Among the other nominees? Cagney for Love Me or Leave Me. It’s interesting seeing Cagney chasing and catching Borgnine since he won’t at Oscar time.

With a better producer, and a better actor in the Davey role, Run for Cover might be viewed as a classic today. It might’ve led to a string of ’50s westerns for Cagney. It didn't. But it ain’t bad.

The many moods of future svengali John Derek. 

WARNING: SPOILERS

There’s a moment two-thirds of the way through “Tribute to a Bad Man,” when Steve Miller (Don Dubbins), the neophyte ranchhand from the east, from Penn-sai-vane-ai-ay, as ranch owner Jeremy Rodock (James Cagney) keeps saying, is trying to convince Rodock’s woman, Jocasta (Irene Papas), to run away with him. She pulls back and looks at him with sympathy. “You are so young,” she says finally.

Here are the ages of the three actors when the movie premiered in April 1956:

• Dubbins: 27
• Papas: 29
• Cagney: 56

So yes. A bit young in the Hollywood scheme of things.

“Bad Man” was supposed to star Spencer Tracy, but he got sick, or the high altitude in the Rockies got to him, or he probably just had second thoughts about the script; but after many delays MGM fired him and came hat-in-hat to Jimmy—who had just starred in the studio’s hit “Love Me or Leave Me,” with Doris Day. “There were some 80 people in Montrose, Colorado, waiting to get the job done,” Cagney wrote in his memoir, Cagney By Cagney. “I was about as interested in working as I was in flying, which means a considerable level below zero, but after much gab, I agreed.

As for what he thought of the film? “The result was all right, I guess.”

Emphasis on “I guess.”

Sloppy seconds
It’s Cagney’s third and final western, and it’s not as good as the others. It’s Cinemascope—his second—and the shooting location in the Rockies is beautiful; but it feels like movie by committee. Hey, Shane worked, let’s adapt another story by that Jack Schaefer guy. Teens are popular, let’s get some kids in there and try to understand them. May/December worked in High Noon, let’s go for that.

Everyone here is a second choice: Cagney for Tracy, who got sick; Dobbins for Robert Francis, who died in a plane crash; Papas for Grace Kelly, who turned it down.

Even the title is sloppy seconds. It was a working title for Vincente Minnelli’s “The Bad and the Beautiful,” where it made more sense; here it’s a misnomer. Is he a bad man? Seems decent enough. And what’s the tribute? Steve’s voice-over? Schaefer’s original title, “Hanging’s for the Lucky,” gets at the conflict. Rodock is a rancher in the Wyoming Territory who dispenses frontier justice for horse thieves. He gets “hanging fever,” according to his men. “It’s fear that keeps men honest,” he tells Jocasta. “And with that hanging today, I laid fear like a fence 10 feet high around my property!” 

Except he didn’t. He keeps making enemies, and they keep coming around to steal his horses. No one raises this point. If hanging’s a deterrent, Rodock, why do you have to keep hanging men? Instead, their message is a mushy moral one. Jocasta just thinks it’s wrong. Steve just thinks it’s wrong, too.

Rodock: He stole my horses, didn’t he? He shot at me, didn’t he? He killed Whitey, didn’t he?
Steve: How do you know he killed Whitey? … You don’t know. You’ll never know. [looks down] I’ll never know.

Along with men trying to steal his horses, Rodock is surrounded by men trying to steal his woman. Jo is the only woman for, what, hundreds of miles? I guess there’s Peterson’s wife (Jeanette Nolan) but she actually looks like a frontier woman. The first time we—and Steve—see Jocasta, she emerges from the shadows, her body wrapped in a white, hip-tugging and low-cut dress, and Steve’s eyes practically fall out of their sockets. That moment is directed and photographed well (by Robert Wise and Robert Surtees, respectively), but it’s not exactly cinema verité.

I assumed Rodock would have to fend off some of his men, particularly after one of them, Fat Jones (Lee Van Cleef), talks up the new mail-order catalogs that have pictures of women in corsets. “I ain’t seen a woman outside of Jocasta in eight months,” he declares with menace, then turns to another wrangler. “And you ain’t gettin’ no prettier.” It’s a good bit, but Cleef barely has a role. No, it’s the smooth head wrangler, McNulty (Stephen McNally), who’s a problem. He’s actually a bigger problem for the movie. He should be two-faced—subservient to Rodock while privately making moves on Jo—but he shows just the one: smarmy and insinuating with both. “You act like a man with a lot of ideas. But all of them second rate—and not one honorable,” Rodock says, but for some reason he keeps him on. It’s a disconnect. Eventually, though, McNulty makes one pass too many, there’s a fistfight, etc. Oddly, when he returns for revenge, he wants the horses rather than the woman.

The other rival for Jo’s attentions is Steve. He should have the better shot—blonde, handsome, age appropriate—but he’s not only “so young,” as she says, but so soft. Cringingly so. His voice narrates the film, about how both Jo and Rodock helped him become a man, but I don’t see him living long enough in the Wild West to reflect back on it all. I’m shocked he made it all the way to Rodock’s place to begin with.

But that’s the movie’s conceit. Soft Steve needs to toughen up while tough Rodock needs to soften.

Turnin' of the earth
For all this, the movie still has a shot. In the final act, McNulty teams with Peterson’s son, Lars (Vic Morrow), who bears a longstanding familial grudge, and a third man, Barjak (James Griffith), to steal Rodock’s mares and foals. Rodock and Steve find the horses and the thieves in a valley; but before he can get to hanging, he realizes the mares have had their hooves cut to the bone, making it painful for them to walk. These men crippled these horses for life, in order to make sure they didn’t stray. It’s the most horrific act in the movie. I wanted them hanged. But this is when Rodock doesn’t do it. Instead, in an eye-for-an-eye moment, he makes them take off their boots and march the 100 or 200 miles to the nearest town/jail. Steve and Rodock ride behind on their horses.

The pace is relentless—a slow, steady drumbeat. The thieves begin to stagger, stockinged feet torn and bloody, but he keeps them marching. It recalls an earlier, “Searchers”-esque line of Steve’s when Rodock was pursuing Whitey’s killer. “He kept going … He kept going…” There, though, Rodock’s relentlessness fed his anger; here, the opposite. Steve counsels restraint (“Mr. Rodock, you gotta stop”; “This ain’t punishment, Mr. Rodock, it’s revenge!”), and Rodock slowly relents. He gives the prisoners water and lets them rest in the shade. His reward? Lars tells him he’s greedy and cruel. He lets Barjak, who’s collapsed, ride the rest of the way; Lars tells him “My pa shoulda killed you 20 year ago.” Eventually Rodock just lets them go—these horse thieves and cripplers. He even returns Lars to his mother personally. His reward? Lars goes for a shotgun and tries to kill him.

So maybe Rodock was right all along about frontier justice? It just takes too much to get these guys before a judge. Sadly, Rodock doesn’t point this out; he becomes good for the sake of being good. His reward? When he returns to the ranch, Jo leaves him for Steve.

Except when she finds out Rodock didn’t hang the horse thieves, she returns to him with open arms. That’s our happy ending. Good comes to the good. Or so Hollywood wants us to believe. Probably because we want to believe it.

Good deeds
I still think there’s something in that final act if they’d just finetuned it. Maybe Steve is horrified by the horse crippling and wants blood, and maybe this is why Rodock holds back on the hanging—because he doesn’t want Steve to become like him. Or sure, continue with the long march, but prove Rodock right. Acknowledge the danger in it—the long absence. Maybe deliver the men to the judge, as Jo wanted, then return to find Jo killed or missing. Just gone, and he'll never find out why.

During the 1950s, movie studios kept pairing Cagney with young, dull male co-stars whom they hoped would become stars but never did: John Derek, Roger Smith twice, Don Dubbins twice. Cagney is either learned and teaches (“Run for Cover”), or corrupt and learns (“These Wilder Years,” “Man of a Thousand Faces”), or corrupt and teaches (“Never Steal Anything Small”). Here, I guess, he’s corrupt but teaches wrangling while learning a higher moral standard. The worst part is the sense that Rodock wants the approval of the kids: not just Steve but Lars, too. Somewhere, Tom Powers spits.

Because of the Spencer Tracy overruns, “Tribute to a Bad Man” didn’t make back half its cost, and Cagney, a true outdoorsman, increasingly attracted to the western genre, never got to make another western. His good deed (filling in for Tracy) went punished. A better lesson than the mushy one the movie gives us.

Minneapolis newspaper ad from 1956. Wonder where the free parking was.

WARNING: SPOILERS 

So were there any competent Navy captains in the Pacific during World War II? It’s a wonder we won.

At first blush, “Mister Roberts” seems like a lighter, breezier, Cinemascope and Technicolor (sorry: Warnercolor) version of “The Caine Mutiny,” with its incompetent captain obsessed with fruit (oranges rather than strawberries) and played by a 1930s Warner Bros. gangster (James Cagney instead of Humphrey Bogart). But that’s kind of backwards. “Mister Roberts” came first. It was a best-selling novel in 1946 and a smash Broadway play in 1948, while Herman Wouk’s “The Caine Mutiny” wasn’t published until 1951. Many of its reviews even invoked “Roberts”:

• “‘The Caine Mutiny’ is a sort of serious ‘Mister Roberts’… — Des Moines Register
• “His Captain Queeg [is] … somewhat reminiscent of the commanding officer in the play, ‘Mister Roberts’…” — Hutchinson News

“Caine,” however, did beat “Roberts” to the screen by a year, which is par for the course for later Cagney. He made his WWII movie (“Blood on the Sun”) at the tail end of WWII, his O.S.S. movie (“13 Rue Madeleine”) a year after the officially sanctioned “O.S.S.,” and his Huey Long movie, “A Lion Is In the Streets,” four years after “All the King’s Men” won best picture. “Come Fill the Cup,” his movie about alcoholism, showed up six years after “Lost Weekend.”

Now this.

America to me
Cagney gets second billing here—he’s next to Henry Fonda on the title card—but it’s not a meaty role. It’s small and one-note. The Captain’s wartime goals seem to be: 1) prevent his men from going on leave; 2) prevent Lt. Roberts from being transferred; 3) don’t share fresh fruit. He’s a petty asshole who barely gets a name.

What’s his inner life? His backstory? Lt. Barney Greenwald salutes Queeg’s earlier career—“Who was standing guard over this fat, dumb, happy country of ours?”—but the only one defending the Captain is the Captain. During an argument with Roberts, he gives his raison d’etre: class resentment.

I’ve been seeing your kind around since I was 10 years old—working as a busboy. “Oh busboy, it seems my friend has thrown up on the table. Clean up that mess, boy, will ya?” And then when I went to sea as a steward—people poking at you with umbrellas. “Oh, boy! You, boy! Careful with that luggage, boy!” And I took it. I took it for years! But I don't have to take it any more. There’s a war on, and I’m captain of this vessel, and now you can take it for a change!

That’s only vaguely interesting, probably because it’s so vague. Not to mention incomplete. It may explain his pettiness toward Roberts but not to the mostly working-class boys on his ship. He’s awful to them, too.

On Broadway, the role of the Captain was actually darker. He was played by William Harrigan, a longtime character actor in Hollywood, whose roles included “Mac” McKay, Cagney’s gangster benefactor in “G-Men.” He was also the real-life son of Edward Harrigan, a 19th-century Irish playwright/actor for whom George M. Cohan wrote the song “Harrigan,” which, of course, Cagney sang with such gusto in “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” Amazing the connections when you dig a little. 

Joshua Logan, who co-wrote both play and film, criticized the way John Ford directed the Captain character. “In Christ’s name, what has Ford made Cagney do [but] play the Captain like an old New England bumbler, without any hatred, without darkness, without threat? He’s all Down East accent—and comic at that.” Logan also complained how the atmosphere on the ship changed from “prison-like” in the play to “boys camp“ in the movie. But apparently that was necessary to get the cooperation of the U.S. Navy.

All of which created a mess behind the scenes. I’ll try to untangle it.

Because he was 49 years old and hadn’t starred in a movie in eight years, Warner Bros. didn’t even want Henry Fonda, one of the biggest movie stars in the world, to star in the movie version of a play for which he’d already won a Tony. They wanted Marlon Brando or William Holden. But Ford fought for him. Then he fought with him. Fonda hated the lighter, breezier tone and at one point the two men came to blows.

Ford also fought for Cagney and then with Cagney. Apparently on the first day of shooting, Cagney was slightly late, Ford went into a tirade, but Cagney cut it short: “When I started this picture, you said we would tangle asses before this was over. I’m ready now. Are you?” Ford wasn’t, and eventually his excessive drinking got him canned. The irony is he was replaced by Mervyn LeRoy, whom Cagney hated. Cagney did one movie with him, ”Hard to Handle" in 1933, and pegged him as a brown-noser who took too much credit on too little talent. LeRoy’s autobiography seems to bear this out. Among other things, he claims credit for directing Cagney in one of his first films, “Hot Stuff” in 1929. The problem? Cagney wasn’t in “Hot Stuff.” He wasn't even in Hollywood until 1930. 

Another irony: That “boys camp” atmosphere Ford fought for is the part of the movie that’s actually aged the worst. The crew seems both gay dream team (young, fit, shirtless, sweaty) and #MeToo scandal waiting to happen (voyeurism; literally tearing the clothes off women during shore leave). They're also, per every Hollywood WWII movie, a melting-pot vision of America—except more melted than usual. Sure, we get a Rodrigues (Perry Lopez) and a Stefanowski (Harry Carey Jr.), but they hardly register. It’s mostly bland, randy white guys who come from nowhere specific. The one time anyone brings up a state back home, it’s the Shore Patrol Officer with the bad southern accent (Martin Milner), who tells Roberts that six of his men razed the home of a French colonial governor. An Army private brought them there as a joke: 

Shore Patrol Officer: He told them it was, uh... well, what we call in Alabama … uh…
Mr. Roberts: Yeah, we call it the same thing in Nebraska.

I like that they use Fonda’s home state for Mister Roberts’ home state.

Fonda makes the movie. His goal is noble. The Reluctant is a cargo supply ship drifting in a chain of islands in the Pacific, far from the war, and Roberts wants to be where the war is—he recognizes the historical moment—but his transfer is continually denied by the Captain. Since Roberts can’t get what he wants, he at least tries to get the men what they need. Sure, men, you can take your shirts off in these hellish conditions. Sure, I’ll sacrifice any attempt at transfer and follow all the Captain’s orders forevermore so you guys can have this one shore leave. It’s another of Fonda’s noble men—from Abe Lincoln to Wyatt Earp; from Tom Joad to Juror 8. For the ways Ford screwed up the movie, he couldn’t have fought for a better actor.

He humanizes what is otherwise a fairly cartoonish group. Just that opening, looking out at the open water, the yearning and hurt on his face. He obsesses over his latest transfer letter like he’s an upbeat Joseph K., giving Doc (William Powell) a boyish grin at his new turn of the phrase—the thing that he hopes will finally get him transferred. And that Fonda voice: slow, measured, stretching out his words: “Carriers so big they blacked out half the sky. Battlewagons sliiiding along, dead quiet.” You know the song lyric, “What is America to me?” Henry Fonda isn’t a bad answer. 

Even with this great open, though, you sense the movie’s behind-the-scenes schism. Roberts walks out on deck on a sunny day, surveys the horizon with the water bright blue, then sits down with a pencil in his mouth—like a dog with a bone—to go over the letter again. Then it’s a reverse angle for the intro of Doc and … Where did the sun go? We don’t really see anything but the metal of the ship. I assume it was shot on a sound stage in LA rather than off the coast of Hawaii. It’s a disconnect. It’s Ford vs. LeRoy.

Crud
A quick synopsis. In the first act, the men admire Roberts. In the second act, not knowing his sacrifice, they turn on him, think he’s bucking for promotion. Third act? After he tosses the Captain’s prize palm tree overboard, and the men learn about his sacrifice through a kind of loudspeaker ex machina, they work to get him the transfer he’s always wanted. And they do! And they shower him with gifts and send him on his way.

And on that battleship, he dies in the waning days of the war.

Oddly, there’s no mea culpa from the men, no thought of, “Gee, if we hadn’t have gotten him that transfer …” Instead, Ensign Pulver (Jack Lemmon, in an Oscar-winning role), who is now a lieutenant and in Roberts’ role, and who never had the guts to finish one thing, finally does. He does what Roberts might’ve done—but with Pulver’s bluster. Over the loudspeaker, they hear that the night’s movie has been canceled, and, in a sudden rage, Pulver a secondary palm tree overboard and busts into the Captain’s quarters:

Captain, it is I, Ensign Pulver, and I just threw your stinkin’ palm tree overboard! Now what’s all this crud about no movie tonight?

Roberts is dead; Roberts lives.

Sadly, Cagney’s reaction is a comic wuh-wuh. It’s “Not this again?” as he buries his face in his hands. It feels off, considering what we’ve just learned about Roberts.

I like all the loudspeaker announcements we hear in the movie—spoken in that bored military cadence of an amateur draftee. “Attention! Attention!” Then some stupid annoying thing. Then: “That is all.” Fifteen years later, the movie “M*A*S*H” would use these to great comic effect.

“Mister Roberts” was nominated for three Academy Awards—picture, sound, supporting—and won for Lemmon. Don’t quite see it. His character is only mildly amusing, with that classic Lemmon jitteriness that never appealed to me. I like the calm guys. The opening scene, in the morning on the deck, where Doc and Roberts talk? That could’ve been the movie for me. But Fonda didn’t even get nominated. He got nomed for “Grapes of Wrath” in 1940 and not again until “On Golden Pond” in 1981. It’s one of the great travesties of the Academy.

WARNING: SPOILERS

“Never Steal Anything Small” is a musical that feels ashamed to be a musical. We’re meeting Linda Cabot (Shirley Jones) for the first time, about 25 minutes in, and suddenly she starts singing. And it throws us. Oh, right, this is a musical. It’s the first song we’ve heard since the opening chorus.

How many songs do we hear overall? Five maybe? Many are consumerist. Jones’ first song is all about clothes (“I Haven’t Got a Thing to Wear”), “I’m Sorry, I want a Ferrari” takes place in a car showroom, while “It Takes Love to Make a Home” is a TV commercial for a cleaning product called “Love.” “Thing to Wear” is the cutest, “Ferrari” the most memorable, “Love” the missed opportunity. It’s supposed to satirize commercial jingles but doesn’t dig deep enough. It’s not jingly, either.

Despite all this, “Never Steal Anything Small” almost has a chance. It’s about a Damon Runyonesque figure, Jake MacIllaney (James Cagney), who runs for president of his union local, wins, then keeps the machinations going to rise further. That could’ve worked. He’s a charming scoundrel. But he goes a machination too far. He not only tries to pin his own graft on his naïve lawyer, Dan Cabot (Roger Smith, whom Cagney discovered while on vacation in Hawaii), he breaks up Cabot and his wife, too. At first I thought it was because Linda wanted Dan to steer clear of Jake, so Jake needs her out of the picture—but that’s not it. He wants Linda for himself.

Keep in mind: At the time of filming, Jones was an unblemished 23 while Cagney was a craggy 58. It’s kinda creepy. 

Addressed as sir
The movie opens with Cagney at a piano, talk-singing to the camera, about advice his father gave him to never steal anything … never steal anything … small. It’s not bad. Even better, we get these lines, which probably ring truer during the Trump years than they did in the Eisenhower era:

Steal 100 dollars and they put you in stir
Steal 100 million they address you as “sir”

 I liked all of this. I liked that the opening title card alludes to Cagney’s breakthrough picture a quarter-century earlier: “This picture is sympathetically dedicated to labor and its problems in coping with a new and merry type of public enemy … the charming, well-dressed gentleman who cons his way to a union throne.” Then we get a speech by Cagney on the waterfront. And it really is the waterfront. A lot of the movie was shot on location in New York City—this scene was apparently at the Fulton Street pier in lower Manhattan—and it’s so great to be outdoors in a real place with Cagney it makes you wonder what we missed with all those ’30s Cagney flicks shot in the studio. 

“Anything Small” is basically a series of problems Jake solves, only to have the solution lead to another problem. At Union Local 26, he’s running against longtime president O.K. Merritt (Horace McMahon) but needs money to win. That’s the problem. So he and his boys shake down “Sleep-Out” Charlie (Jack Albertson), a penny-pinching loan shark, to get the dough. That’s the solution. Except Sleep-Out rats on him and Jake is arrested. Problem. So he gets Sleep-Out’s girlfriend to slip him a mickey and Sleep-Out wakes up in a (fake) iron lung while a (fake) doctor tells him he should go to Yuma, Ariz. for his health. And there goes that problem. Amid some strongarming, Jake then wins the election and takes over the local.

Except he finds out his newbie lawyer, Dan, is dropping him as a client because his wife objects, which means the Sleep-Out case may be delayed, which means Sleep-Out might be back in time for it. Can’t have that. So he goes to see Dan but instead finds his charming wife singing “I Haven’t Got a Thing to Wear,” and he falls for her. Now his machinations are two-fold: wooing Dan back with a big office, which takes care of the Sleep-Out case; and equipping the big office with a hot, well-appointed secretary, Winnipeg Simmons (Cara Williams), who, on instructions from Jake, seduces Dan. Which takes care of the Cabot marriage, allowing Jake to move in. 

The rest of the movie is this bifurcated plotline: How to rise in the ranks while winning over Linda. Early on, he tells Winnipeg: “I like to scheme. I get a boot out of a nice, sharp scheme.” I admit: The stuff with the union, where his opponents are other sharpies, grifters, and mob bosses, is fun. But the other storyline? Just awkward. Creepy. Plus, why is Linda amenable to him? She didn’t want Dan representing him but she’ll consider dating him? No logic there.

I might have swallowed some of this if Cagney weren’t so much older than Jones—and obviously older rather than, say, “Cary Grant older.” But this is how apparent their age difference is: The movie acknowledges it. Yes. Even though older men with younger women is generally treated as normal in the movie, in this one Jake raises the issue: “Maybe age doesn’t make as much difference as you think,” he tells Linda over coffee. “Elderly guys and young gals—getting to be quite the fashion.” Truer words were never said in Hollywood.

As for Dan? Too much of a patsy to be interesting. He not only loses his beautiful wife, he allows Jake to use his name on some local larceny. As a result, when Jake runs against mob boss Pinelli (an excellent Nehemiah Persoff) to take over United Stevedores, and Pinelli alerts the cops to Jake’s graft, Jake simply points the finger at Dan, whose name is on everything. Interestingly, it’s the same scam played on Cagney’s character, Biff, in “The Strawberry Blonde” 20 years earlier. Maybe that’s where Jake gets his schemes—watching old Cagney flicks.

Put in stir
For a movie about a corrupt union man, there’s a real knowledge and pride in union history. While trying to woo Linda, for example, Jake says the world isn’t a garden but a jungle, where the winner is always right, and without unions “the jungle could be a whole lot crueler.” He ticks off past union heroes—Samuel Gompers, John L. Lewis, Dubinsky, Meany and Reuther—and the assumption is the audience knows who most of them are. Love that. Different world.

I also like the twist at the end. Jake fingers Dan, who’s carted away by the cops, and Linda pleads for Dan’s sake. She asks Jake to take the rap for his own crimes. She says she’ll do anything Jake asks—even marry him. “You’d go that far just to keep that square out of the can?” he asks. He seems both incredulous and pissed off. Then he works himself into a lather talking up how Dan will have it made when he gets out. “He can go into union politics. When the story gets out, the member will think he stole all that money for them—for their clubhouse and their benefits. He’ll be a real vote-getter in the unions, all the unions. A very popular figure.” That’s when the light bulb goes on. “Yeah. Why should he be the popular figure?” And he does what Linda wants. Without the marriage. Or the anything.

It is a bit ridiculous that Dan is still Jake’s attorney during the final trial. One, why would Dan bother to help him? Two, can you actually represent someone whose confession to a crime got you off the hook? Either way, after the guilty verdict, Jake plants a big kiss on Linda’s lips and then happily goes to the stir—with the foreknowledge that when he gets out he’ll be running it all. It’s another ’50s movie that has to make Cagney the hero, or anti-hero, when he’s really the villain. Cf., “Love Me or Leave Me.”

“Never Steal Anything Small” was written and directed by Charles Lederer, who is mostly a writer (“His Girl Friday,” “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes”) and rarely a director (this is his third, last and best-known). He adapted it from an unproduced play, “The Devil’s Hornpipe,” by Maxwell Anderson and Rouben Mamoulian—which apparently wasn’t a musical, although Anderson and Allie Wrubel (“Song of the South”) wound up writing 13 songs for it. Only a handful made it in. Then they kept tinkering. I guess previews were bad? The movie was filmed between October 1957 and January 1958 but not released until March 1959.

It was supposed to be a big deal. In July 1956, The New York Times wrote about it under the headline UNIVERSAL PLANS ‘BIG’ MUSICAL FILM, and in the first graph we get an unattributed insider quote saying it will be “one of the biggest pictures ever made.”

It wasn’t, but it almost had a chance.