Movie Reviews - 1930s posts

DeMille getting away with it, post-Breen.

WARNING: SPOILERS

Given recent controversies around Cleopatra, an early scene here hits hard.

At this point in the story, Cleopatra (Claudette Colbert), in Egypt, has wooed Julius Caesar (Warren William), and now we cut back to the gossip-mongers of Rome. Cleopatra’s name is mentioned, dismissed by some, but a naïve woman says she’s heard “all kinds of things” and asks with seriousness:

Is she black?

There’s a pause. And everyone else laughs uproariously.

I guess one generation’s joke is another generation’s unending point of contention. But it's interesting that it was already out there 100 years ago. Though dismissed out of hand, it was brought up. People knew.

“Is she black?”

Frightened people
Apparently they made this because “The Sign of the Cross” (1932), directed by Cecil B. DeMille and starring Colbert, was a huge hit, while “Four Frightened People” (1934), with both, was not. So Paramount's Adolph Zukor said, not unreasonably, “Why not another historical epic with lots of sex in it?”

I’m curious how much sex there would’ve been without Joe Breen's Production Code, which gained the power to stem Hollywood’s prurient/profitable impulses in the summer of 1934. Watching all the half-naked girls writhing around, I assumed it came out in the early months of ’34. Nope. September. But DeMille, big on bacchanalia followed by shame (lots of bacchanalia, a soupcon of shame), was always good at getting away with it—probably because his sex/shame cycles tended to be within historical/religious epics. While this one isn’t religious, we do get a villainous Herod (Joseph Scildkraut) for a few scenes, as if to say (maybe to Breen), “Guess who's coming to dinner?”

DeMille’s “Cleopatra” is better than I though it would be, and it’s mostly thanks to Colbert. This remembrance by DeMille, per IMDb, is instructive:

“She wanted to do something different with Cleopatra, not make her lofty or fussy or superstitious—nothing like that. She set out to give her humor and humanity, and she stamped her own personality on the role. She emerged from it most vividly, I thought.”

All of that shines through. Her Cleopatra is down-to-earth and calculating, breezy and fun.

She begins the film powerless, having been kidnapped by Pothinos (Leonard Mudie), the eunuch right-hand man of her brother Ptolemy, and brought bound and gagged and left to die in the desert. For some reason, they leave the philosopher Apollodorus (Irving Pichel) with her, so he promptly unties her, reminds her that Caesar is approaching, which is why she was kidnapped: Rome wanted to deal with the more pliant Ptolemy. But she smuggles her way back to Cairo in a rug, which is unfurled before Caesar, and the wooing begins. William's Caesar is more business than pleasure, so he only turns in her direction when she shows her empire-building acumen. But the dalliance causes tongues to wag in Rome and eventually leads to Caesar’s Ides of March death at the hands of colleagues and friends—including, as Caesar says here, “You too, Brutus?” 

Which leaves Cleopatra (not to mention “Cleopatra”) adrift again. That’s the problem with cozying up to power. Power shifts. Who has it now? It’s a triumvirate, with Marc Antony (Henry Wilcoxon) one of the three. The movie does some fancy footwork to keep her sympathetic. She’s 1) distraught over Caesar’s death, until 2) courtiers tell her he never really loved her, which gives her leave to 3) seduce Antony for the good of Egypt, at which point she 4) falls in love for real, as does he, and we get their grand love story.

It's also when my interest flagged. Maybe because Wilcoxon is strong-jawed, stentorian and a little dull? Again, Rome turns on the lover of Cleopatra, with Octavian (Ian Keith) now leading the charge. The Battle of Actium scenes aren’t much, mostly quick cuts and stock footage and re-used footage. Feels like it was done on the cheap. Not exactly a cast of thousands.

I’ve forgotten the official story around Antony and Cleopatra—if I ever knew—but this one includes some Shakespearean misunderstandings leading to their deaths. Antony’s army has deserted him, Egypt is besieged, and in defeat Cleopatra tries to work the levers of power once more—but in defense of Antony rather than Egypt. She’s willing to surrender if his life is spared. Antony, however, assumes she’s once again seducing a power broker of Rome—from Caesar to him to Octavian—and stabs himself in grief. “I was pleading for your life and you were taking it!” she cries. After he goes, she takes her own life with the asp.

Why her?
Again, not great but not bad. With a better Antony you might’ve had a story that could ring through the ages.

Why does the story of Cleopatra ring through the ages? Is it the woman in power thing? Seduction? Sex? And with Antony giving up power for love like Edward VIII? I’d love to see how her story has changed over the centuries. How much do we update it for the times? What do we need her to be now?

1934 was a big year for Colbert: She starred in four films, including the No. 1 box-office hit (“Cleopatra”), an attempt to take on racial matters (“Imitation of Life,” with Louise Beavers), and “It Happened One Night,” which became the first movie, and one of only three in Hollywood history, to win Oscars in the five major awards: picture, director, actor, actress and screenplay. May we all have such years.

Newspapers.com's timeline for the Queen of the Nile. Colbert's version had a nice little bump in 1934 but it was Liz in 1963 when things skyrocketed. Not sure what accounts for the spike in 2000.

WARNING: SPOILERS

My favorite part was the pledge of allegiance. 

About 30 minutes in, we see children at a New York City public school reciting it, and you can’t help but notice what’s missing. Yes, it’s 1937, so “under God” isn’t there; that wasn’t added until the 1950s. But that’s not what I’m talking about. Here’s what they recite:

I pledge allegiance to the flag
And to the republic for which it stands
One nation, indivisible
With liberty and justice for all

I’m 62 years old and I didn’t know that “… of the United States of America” wasn’t part of the original pledge? When was it added?

In the xenophobic 1920s, of course, when we also added a tons of caveats to Emma Lazarus’ words. Back then, patriots didn’t want people in America to pledge to any old flag, particularly foreign ones, so they added what they added, and we got what we got. And now we are where we are in the xenophobic 2020s. Plus ça change.

The kids don’t put their hands over hearts, either, as we did at Burroughs Elementary in the 1970s; they do it with a hand-to-forehead salute. Admittedly, some of these aren’t exactly spit-and-polish. A few look a little “Woe is me.” Unintentionally.

But this is what I like about watching old movies. Even when they’re bad, you learn something.

From the Vashon Island News-Record masthead around the turn of the last century.

Shirley Temple with a twist
Yeah, it’s another rote Warner Bros. flick in its Year Without Cagney. Bogart is third-billed and hardly in it, and anyway he’s hardly Humphrey Bogart. He’s a family man who gets skittish at all the wrong times. He’s about as far from “Humphrey Bogart” as I am.

It’s one-note. James Aloysius O’Malley (Pat O’Brien) is a beat cop who has a thing for rules and regulations. He’s constantly giving out unncessary tickets and citations, and no one is able to get through that thick Irish skull of his that he might want to temper things. These are the attempts: 

• The press writes mocking stories about him
• His captain orders him to be more judicious
• A family man, pulled over by O’Malley for a faulty muffler, loses his job, resorts to crime, and is sent away for 2 to 10 

Here’s what finally works:

• A little girl

And not just any little girl. It’s Warners’ answer to Shirley Temple … Sybil Jason!

Yeah, I didn’t know her, either. She’s not bad, less cutesy than some.

After the debaccle with the family man, O’Malley is reassigned to school crossing duty at PS 147 (“This will either make him or break him,” says his captain), and initially he’s as humorless as ever. 

But one kid, Barbara (Jason), engaging and lame, takes a shine to him, and little by little breaks through. He makes her a paper crown for May Day, for which she’s queen. Then he saves her from being run over by a speeding car, and, with a teacher, Miss Nolan (Ann Sheridan), he carries her home. There, amid the want (no milk, bread, etc.), she shows him a picture of her daddy, whom she says is off in Canada. It’s John Phillips (Bogart), the man whose life O’Malley wrecked. When mom comes home and sees O’Malley, she berates him. So does Miss Nolan outside. Nolan’s critique is so spot-on (“You’re not a human being, you’re a machine!”), it’s like she watched the first half of the film.

O’Brien tended to play two types, the rule stickler and the priest, and this is the point in the film when the former gives way to the latter. “Nobody ever wants to play with me—on account of my leg," Barbara tells O'Malley, crying, so O'Malley visits every doctor in town until he finds an expert who can fix her leg—pro bono. Then he convinces the parole board to spring Phillips. Then he buys toys, from “Canada,” so Phillips can give them to Barbara.

Except, in prison, Phillips is warned by a fellow con (perennial Warner Bros. yegg Stanley Fields) that on the outside the cops won’t leave him alone until he’s back in the stir. And sure enough, everyone in his neighborhood tells Phillips that O’Malley is looking for him. That sends Phillips to drinking, and sweating, and when O’Malley shows up on his doorstep he shoots in a panic and O’Malley tumbles down the stairs.

That’s why, in the hospital, O’Malley reverts. “I knew Phillips was no good!” he shouts at Miss Nolan. “He robs a guy because he loses a job? He shoots me because he gets a little nervous? And you want him back out on the streets!?”

Kidding. The cops are ready to bust Phillips but O’Malley covers for him, everything works out, all the kids love O'Malley and maybe Miss Nolan, too. The End.

The stickler and the priest
For the curious: Sybil Jason was discovered in South Africa, touted as Warner Bros. answer to Shirley Temple, and quickly put on the treadmill, co-starring with various Warners’ stars over a three-year period: Robert Armstrong in “Little Big Shot,” Kay Francis in “I Found Stella Parish,” Al Jolson in “The Singing Kid.” She never quite caught on. After those, she did this one, a bunch of shorts, one more movie with Kay Francis, then she signed with 20th Century Fox where she acted in support of Shirley Temple. When World War II broke out, she was in South Africa and got stuck there. When she returned to the states she was 18. She never made another movie but lived a long life.

So what was the deal with Warner Bros. and the Irish in the 1930s? They totally had a thing. Was it just dollar signs? Has anyone written on this?

Sheridan doesn't canoodle, Bogart isn't a killer. Otherwise...

Unfortunately, they didn't scoff at love, laugh at marriage or live for luxury alone: 0-3.

WARNING: SPOILERS

The women of “The Public Enemy” (Harlow! Clarke!) are reunited here as small-town girls who go to the big city to earn money and avoid assholes. They do better with the former.

As the movie opens, Gladys (Mae Clarke) is already in New York, and showers mom back in Chillicothe, Ohio, with gifts from her $200-a-week gig. Meanwhile, Cassie (Jean Harlow) is making $15 as a soda jerk, and that ain't cutting it, so she goes, too. The move merely gets her a different soda-jerk job, where, one day, she makes a Bromo-Selzer and engages in weak repartee with a hungover Jerry (Walter Byron), whose redeeming quality is he’s not handsy:

Jerry: Oh, go away. I hate blondes.
Cassie: Well, I hate drunks, so that makes us even.

One Frenchman
Eventually she seeks out Gladys, who is working as a model for a department store, and who gets a swell idea. Why doesn’t Cassie work with her! This is less runway modeling than showing off clothes to dept. store customers. Amusingly, the snooty French boss rejects Cassie—who is, after all, Jean Harlow—when she overdoes the hips in her tryout. But Gladys is determined. “Listen, when you walk, forget you have hips,” she says. “Let them take care of themselves—they always do.” She also plays off the big Sophie Tucker hit of the day. “I’m going to show him there’s one Frenchman that can be wrong.” Then she dresses up Cassie in haute couture, Frenchie is amazed, gig gotten.

So where the drama for the rest of the movie? Love, love, love.

Gladys has fallen for Arthur (Jameson Thomas), who looks like a B-movie villain and acts accordingly. He’s a real lout, who’s already married but claims he’s trying to get out of it. Except when Gladys innocently/stupidly introduces him to Cassie (who is, after all, Jean Harlow), he makes a play for her.

Meanwhile, Jerry returns to the picture. He’s the nicer version of Arthur, and, even with Gladys warning her all the while about men and love, Cassie falls for him. Guess what? He’s married, too! To the patrician Ruth (Natalie Moorhead, the awful wife of “The Office Wife”), who refuses to grant him a divorce now that he wants one. She’s that type.

Get it? Gladys, who's fallen for a lout, keeps warning Cassie about men, even though she's fallen for a not-lout. That’s the movie. Gladys wrings her hands, Cassie snaps her gum, and Cassie’s roommate Dot (silent movie star Marie Prevost) tries to provide comic relief as the plain girl with the work-from-home typing job who falls for Jerry’s chauffeur (Andy Devine). She also reminds Gladys that there’s a Depression going on:

Dot: Say, the trouble with you is, you’ve forgotten how awful it is to live in a dump like this. You don't know what it means to have to cut down on your food, so you can scrap together the rent or else old horse-face downstairs will throw you out on your whatsit. Listen, did you ever have to eat liverwurst seven days a week, cause you couldn't afford anything else? Well, try it sometime, you'll be nuts about it.
Gladys: You got to hang onto your self respect, Dot. And that's important.
Dot: Aw, what's your self respect when your hungry? It won't get you a porterhouse, will it?

Dot doesn’t listen. And when crummy old Arthur renews his vows to his wife (which somehow makes the front page of The New York Sun), she takes poison and kills herself. That prompts Cassie to return to the soda fountain at Chillicothe, where, behind a newspaper, a man orders a Bromo-Seltzer. Guess who? And guess what the newspaper headline reads? Yep, it’s Jerry, the hed is all about his divorce. Big smooch. The end. 

Two deaths
It’s Columbia Pictures—apparently the last time MGM loaned out Harlow—and the movie doesn’t have the wit or snap of precode Warner Bros. Probably doesn’t help that it was directed by William Beaudine, who made 179 features during his career, and was famous, or infamous, for doing them quickly. This one took three weeks in October 1931, per AFI.

Even the title is bad. “Three Wise Girls”? What’s wise about them? The novel is called, “Blonde Baby,” way better, but apparently the Hays Office nixed it and Columbia caved. Or maybe Columbia was worried about the many “blonde” titles from the period: “Platinum Blonde” (with Harlow), “Blonde Crazy” (with Cagney), “Blonde Captive” (exploitation doc from Lowell Thomas). They also turned Cassie into a good girl—in the novel, she knowingly sleeps with a married man. But it is precode so everyone and Cassie’s mother tell Harlow to take off her clothes. And she obliges. Within limits, Poindexter.

The one wise girl who dies young here, Clarke, lived longest in real life—until 1992. The other two ended tragically. Provost had been a silent leading lady but gained weight in her thirties, relegating her to roles like this; and when she tried to regain her figure, she died from a combination of malnutrition and alcoholism. That was in January 1937. Six months later, Harlow died suddenly of uremic poisoning—the same disease that would get director Beaudine in 1970.

Above title credit for the magazine article? Those were the days. 

WARNING: SPOILERS

A publishing giant, Lawrence Fellowes (Lewis Stone), hires Kate Halsey (Blanche Friderici), a cigar-smoking, suit-wearing woman who wants to be the next Ernest Hemingway, Jack London or Jim Tully, to write a book about the phenomenon of businessmen romancing their secretaries, or some such. He has to convince her to do this since she has no interest in the subject. And he does this even though he has no interest in his own secretary—a mousy thing named Miss Andrews (Dale Fuller) forever trying to entice him. In fact, when Andrews discovers the boss is getting married, to someone else, she faints in his office then leaves the firm. 

She’s quickly replaced by Anne Murdock (Dorothy Mackaill), a Constance-Bennett-looker who rose through the ranks via hard work. She’s reminded of this by her fussy office manager, J.P. McGowan (Hobart Bosworth). “Anne, you got this on your work. What I mean is, charm counts, but you got this on your brains. Don’t forget that Anne. … Now run along, fix your face.”

Nice mixed message. So what happens? She tries to seduce the boss, of course: bringing in flowers, hiking her skirt above the knee, showing off those gams. It’s a 180-degree turn that makes no sense. Is she suddenly enamored of him? Was Lewis Stone, the future Judge Hardy of the Andy Hardy movies, considered the Robert Redford of 1930? No clue.

Anyway, very shortly, he’s interested in her, too. Yes, him, the newlywed workaholic. But can they make it work? They can! His wife is already sick of him and fooling around with some other schlub. The whole thing is icky but love wins.

As for the book Fellowes commissioned? Forgotten. Poor Kate and her cigars.

“The Office Wife” is not a good film but it’s been preserved by the Library of Congress—I assume for this reason: it's the feature-film debut of Joan Blondell. A few months earlier, she’d been in “Penny Arcade” on Broadway, Al Jolson saw it, bought the rights, and recommended two of its players to Warner Bros.: Blondell and a short guy named Cagney. Cagney didn’t debut until the screen version of “Penny Arcade” (retitled “Sinners' Holiday”) later that year, but Warners stuck Blondell into a bathtub as soon they could.

Feature-film debut of Joan Blondell: Get that girl into a bathtub STAT!

Playing Anne’s sister Katherine, Blondell is the best thing in it. She shows up every so often to lay down the truth. When her sister, distraught over her love for Mr. Fellowes (or Fellows, it’s spelled both ways), reminds her that she’s never loved anybody so what does she know, Katherine responds, “Nothing. And I hope I stay dumb. One sap in the Murdock family is plenty.” Katherine also says this about Ted, the guy Anne is dating, a real pill who thinks highly of himself and not-so-highly of Anne: “Ted wants a parking space for a couple of babies and free laundry. If you want to learn what the word lonesome is, take him on.”

All the names are wrong, by the way. “Katherine” sounds way too patrician for the straight-shooting, working class Blondell. Anne should be Katherine and Katherine should be Anne (Blondell wound up playing three Annes before 1933), or anything else, really, while McGowan would’ve been better suited with the actor’s real name. “Hobart Bosworth” is too good to just sit there.

I am intrigued by the obviously lesbian Kate Halsey, who doesn’t seem at all like Faith Baldwin, whose Cosmopolitan magazine series the movie is based on. But, as mentioned, she's quickly forgotten. Four years later, she wouldn't even have made the cut.

After various machinations, our principles fall in love, and the movie ends on a moonlit beach with this dialogue:

Anne: Will you do something for me, Larry?
Fellows: Anything in the world.
Anne: Then let me pick out your next secretary.

Was this the first of the “I want to schtup my secretary” movies that became popular in the early 1930s? Cf., “Behind Office Doors,” “Big Business Girl,” “Baby Face,” and “She Had to Say Yes”? And has anyone written about them? Feels like an intriguing area—mixing post-suffragette feminism, the necessities of the Great Depression, and that old standby: sex. Or maybe it was just Hollywood moguls creating movies out of their own wish-fulfillment fantasies. Although, one suspects, given the times, most of the wishes were already fulfilled.

Honey, you're never going to be the next Jim Tully this way.

WARNING: SPOILERS

After I became aware of that great triumvirate of 1933 Warner Bros. backstage musicals (“42nd Street,” “Gold Diggers of 1933,” “Footlight Parade”), each with lavish, risqué choreography by Busby Berkeley, and each featuring a a Dick Powell-Ruby Keeler romance backstory with a different male lead (Warner Baxter, Warren William, James Cagney), I wondered whatever became of them. Yes, the Production Code killed the more risqué aspects of them. But before Joe Breen brought the curtain down, did Warners fit in one final version ?

They did! This one. And it’s awful.

It’s also hard to find. And I imagine it’s hard to find not because it’s awful but because of the big closing number: Al Jolson doing “one of his characteristic numbers, for which he is famous,” per bandleader Dick Powell.

Yes: blackface.

It’s brutal to watch but a good lesson for anyone wondering if we’ve made any racial progress in this country. Or for kids in this era of racially blind casting who might not know just how easy it was to make money off racist tropes, and how the majority of the country was totally fine with it.

Wheeeeeps
So (beyond the racism) why is “Wonder Bar” awful? Why is it different than the triumvirate above?

Those movies are all about struggle. How to put on a show. How to survive. That’s a Great Depression theme, so we identify. Hell, it's a universal theme. It's 100 years later and I still identify. This movie is about rich people falling in love in Paris with the wrong person and who gives a shit. Both Al and Tommy love Inez, but Inez loves Harry, as does Madame Renaud, even though Harry only loves himself. None of them are worth a dime. They all deserve each other, but we don’t deserve them.

Should I start from the beginning?

Acclaimed dance partners Inez and Harry (Dolores Del Rio and Ricardo Cortez) wake up in the same apartment, but he’s leaving her. “You knew it was coming,” he says. “See you tonight at the bar.“

Meanwhile, Madame Renault (Kay Francis) is cheating on her husband with Harry. Meanwhile, Tommy (Dick Powell), sings a love song to the photo of Inez on his piano. Meanwhile, Al Wonder (Al Jolson) awakens with a kiss from Inez … but she dissolves into a fantasy. But he decides, that night, to ask her to marry him!

All these machinations collide that evening at the Wonder Bar.

That’s where we also get comic relief Americans: two couples from Schenectady, New York. The husbands, inebriated, and played by Guy Kibbee and Hugh Hubert, are tired of their wives and prone to the flirtations of Mitzi and Claire (Fifi D’Orsay and Merna Kennedy). Their wives (Louise Fazenda and Ruth Donnelly) keep them in check with stern admonishments and dry wit. Fazenda is great, while Donnelly underused. Then the women become prone to their own continental enticements. We get no resolution on this. We don’t see anyone follow through and/or come to their senses.

Between musical numbers, Al Wonder gladhands with his clientele, but the bits come off as old-fashioned ”bits“ rather than real life. Example:

Man: Where ya been for the last three weeks, Al?
Al: Oh, I’ve been to a nudist colony.
Man: A nudist colony?
Al: Yeah, but I’ll never go again.
Man: Why not?
Al: You get tired of looking at the same faces all the time!

Since Al’s work is never done, he also tries to buck up Capt. Hugo Von Ferring (Robert Barrat), who recently lost all of his wealth—as Warner Baxter did in “42nd Street”—except Baxter kept fighting. Von Ferring just plans to kill himself. Al keeps trying to talk him out of it ... until the moment when he basically gives him a push.

And it’s all because of that third musical number.

In the first musical number, Jolson/Wonder welcomes us with “Vive La France.” Then we get the much-ballyhooed Harry and Inez dance routine … which quickly dissolves into a Busby Berkeley fantasy involving masked blondes and their masked beaus. Finally, the third number, a “Gaucho Dance,” with Harry duded up like Valentino, and equipped with a whip. Al’s intro: “In this dance, monsieur Harry whips her with a whip. He whips her, and he wheeps her, and he wheeeps her. But she loves eeet!” Is that a pun I don’t get? Or just more racism?

Cortez (née Jacob Krantz) played the screen’s first Sam Spade, and he was often posited as a post-Valentino Latin lover, but he’s less Valentino than Zeppo: handsome enough, but c’mon, gals. Yet each of the beauties here is crazy for him, begging him to stay, blackmailing him to go to America with him. Before the Gaucho Dance, Inez says she’d turn him over to the cops if she couldn’t go, which leads Harry, in the number, to coming awfully close with that whip. Sensing this, at its close, rather than fake-stab him, she stabs him for real—and the only one who sees it is, of course, Al Wonder. Backstage, Al assures Inez that Harry will be fine. As if on cue, Harry dies.

Worried for Inez, Al remembers his good friend Von Ferring talking about driving his car over a cliff on the way home. So they put Harry in the backseat. In other words, Al decides he shouldn’t stop Von Ferring from killing himself but rather use his suicide to cover up the murder Inez committed.

And this is the movie’s hero.

After the closing number, Al, seeming to realize he’s too old for Inez, pushes her toward Tommy, the Wonder Bar carpet is rolled back up, and that’s that. Think of the crimes swept under that carpet. The greatest of them is the closing number.

The Gaucho Dance: Del Rio and Zeppo.

Goin’ to hell on a mule
Tommy announces the closing number, ”Goin' to Heaven on a Mule,“ the camera pans over, and suddenly we’re no longer on a pristine Parisian stage. There’s dirt and wood chips and a log cabin, and Jolson in blackface talking to a little white girl (also in blackface) about why he loves his mule, Zeke, and why he’d rather ride Zeke than a horse. Then he starts singing:

Ever since I was a little pickaninny
I rode an old Missouri mule
And that’s the only way I’m ever going to travel
I’m a superstitious fool

And when the good Lord tells me
That I’ve sung my closing song
My soul will be on that mule
A’jogging right along

Eventually that comes to pass, and he rides his mule across the rainbow bridge and into an Art Deco heaven. Is it far-sighted that everyone there is black? Or at least blackface? We see St. Peter, Gabriel, the inevitable Warner Bros. gay tailor. Old Black Joe and Uncle Tom are there, too, as is Emperor Jones. Al licks his lips over Pork Chop Orchard, digs into some fried chicken, and takes The Milky Way streetcar to Lennox Ave. and the Big Dipper Cabaret, where, on stage, a giant watermelon is sliced open to reveal a tap dancer. Each second you think, “It can’t get worse,” and then it does. 

Anyway, that’s what killed the Warner Bros. musical: this big number. Everyone was shocked by the racism so Warners stopped making them.

Kidding. “Wonder Bar” was one of Warners biggest hits of 1934. Grossing $2 million worldwide, it was considered a good comeback for Jolson, who all but made Warner Bros. with “The Jazz Singer” but had fallen out of favor with the likes of “Hallelujah I’m a Bum.” In its review, The Kansas City Star felt he was too old for the “Vive la France” number, but that final number, “Goin’ to Heaven on a Mule,” they wrote, “is particularly well done.”

People need to see this stuff. Just this closing number, really. See what everyone was fine with—Warners, the Production Code, The Kansas City Star. See what was deemed, to 1934 eyes, ”particularly well one."

WARNING: SPOILERS

The most intriguing character isn’t the star, Alice White’s Dee Foster, nor any of her chorus-girl friends, nor her dance-director boyfriend, nor any of the mobsters vying for her attention; for me, it’s Scotty (Tom Dugan), the best friend of the dance-director boyfriend. Why him? Because he’s got a stuh-stuh-stuh … He’s got a stuh-stuh-stuh … He has trouble saying words.

And he keeps doing that: trying to say something, getting caught on a word, pivoting to another:

Bad? It’s gru-gru-gre … It’s: you said it alright.

Which is totally a Porky Pig move—six years before Porky Pig was created. (Sidenote: It took me decades to realize that Porky is trying to say “The End,” at the end of Looney Tunes cartoons, but he can’t, which is why he pivots to “That’s all folks!”) I’m sure the trope of a stuttering pivot didn’t begin with Scotty. I could see it as a vaudeville staple. But I like the fact that Porky had antecedents.

The rest of the movie is less intriguing.

Bad girls
How awful are Dee’s pals Florine and Navarre (Marion Byron and Sally Eilers)? They spend the movie pushing their friend away from the guy she loves, and into the arms of a criminal she doesn’t, and to what end? Are they just assholes? The criminal’s got dough and the skinny director doesn’t, but isn’t he at least in the same racket as them? Doesn’t he have connections? Didn’t he get all of them a great writeup in Variety?

A Broadway gal who can take care of herself without help from the sugar boys—she’s a musketeer. A musketeer is a chorus girl who can get along without a cash-and-kiss popup. The three musketeers referred to are Dee Foster, Florine Chandler and Navarre King.

This is what the girls are reading one morning at the rooming house. And Billy (Charles Delaney) was the guy who planted the story! For them. And how is he repaid? “There are too many fat bankrolls flirting with you to go crying over that thin dime!” Florine tells Dee, with a dismissive wave, a few days later. (Great line, btw.) 

These three are part of a show on Broadway for which Billy is choreographer and/or director, and Dee is lead chorus. You know Alice White’s story, right? Charlie Chaplin thought his secretary had pizzazz and suggested she try the acting biz. By the tail-end of the silents she was a star—Warners’ answer to Clara Bowe. Controversies with various men interrupted her career in the early ’30s, she came back as a good supporting comedienne (see: “Picture Snatcher”), and then aged out and disappeared. She died in 1983.

This was her first talkie and it was a hit, but she’s not exactly Ginger Rogers. She has three big numbers, and the catchiest is the most problematic to modern sensibilities: “Jig Jig Jigaloo,” which begins “Down in Bananaland…” The chorus girls carry Zulu warrior/Art Deco shields.

Dee’s playing ingenue here, and I think she’s better with a little snap and crackle. She’s already wide-eyed, so no need to underline it. Her innocence is just a set-up for the men:

Brand: Mr. Gessant is in the importing business from Detroit.
Dee: Really? Importing? Oh, you mean perfume and things like that in bottles?
Stephanos: Yeah. In bottles.

Perc Gessant (Fred Kohler) turns out to be a nice, meaty bootlegger from Detroit who gets roped into card games, where NYC gangsters Brand and Stephanos (Maurice Black and Louis Natheaux) try to fleece him with a scheme involving an upstairs xylophone player. That old gag. To this end, they try to get him to stay in the city longer by shoving Dee in his face.

At the same time, Florine and Navarre are badmouthing Billy. At the same time, Blossom Royal (Jocelyn Lee) can’t keep her hands off Billy. That’s how Dee winds up with Gessant. Hell, she’s going to marry the lug. But this is when Gessant fleeces Brand and Stephanos with the same xylophone bit, and they don’t take kindly to it. On the way to the wedding ceremony—to take place, for some reason, in Dee’s old rooming house—Dee finally breaks it off with him. “I can’t go through with it,” she says. “I thought I could forget Billy, but I can’t.” He doesn’t believe her, but then he’s shot by the other gangsters—a helluva shot, an impossible shot. And at the wedding site, to which Billy has run like an ur-Ben Braddock, a wounded Gessant graciously bows out.

Billy: That’s a pretty big break for me. But that’s pretty tough on you. And I don’t feel so good about that. On the level I don’t, Mr. Gessant.
Gessant: That’s great of ya, kid. But it’s all in the game.

It’s all in the game. Another interesting antecedent. Everything new is old again.

Then Gessant gives his poker winnings to Billy so he can star Dee in a Broadway musical, where we get a closing number that ain’t exactly Ginger Rogers.

Grain of salt
Mervyn LeRoy directed Alice White quite a bit. In his autobiography, “Take One,” LeRoy says it’s because, while she couldn’t act, he could get something out of her:

Poor Alice. You had to tell her everything you wanted her to do, and then go out and practically do it for her. There was a dance scene in the picture, and I wound up waving a handkerchief at her when I wanted her to move one arm or the other. She couldn’t remember her movements without that off-camera semaphore system, but she tried hard.

Take all this with a grain of salt. On the same page, LeRoy claims he directed James Cagney in Hot Stuff in 1929 when Cagney wouldn’t land in Hollywood for another year; and he says he discovered and named Loretta Young for a 1931 picture called “Too Young to Marry,” when, by then, she’d already starred in dozens of film as Loretta Young. 

“Broadway Babies” is one of the many early musicals, almost all of them backstage musicals, that appeared with the advent of sound. They went out of fashion quickly but then roared back with a vengeance with Warners’ 1933 Busby Berkeley triumvirate: “42nd Street,” “Gold Diggers of 1933,” and “Footlight Parade.” Apparently the key was an earnest and bland frontpiece romance (Powell-Keeler), a lot of backstage backbiting, and chorus girls flashing skin.

Speaking of: This is from the beginning of the movie. I imagine jaws dropping along with the stock market.

Navarre appreciates the writeup but could you knock first?

WARNING: SPOILERS 

“Born Reckless” is not good but it is intriguing. It’s another of those movies made before genre plots became codified, so it kind of goes where it wants to go and never quite gets there. It starts out as a gangster flick, veers into immigrant family stuff, and then we’re off to war. Except the war buddies there are hardly buddies (they have two unmemorable scenes together) and the tragedy of war is undercut by all the hokum. I’m curious: Did they get Edmund Lowe of “What Price Glory?” fame because of the war stuff, or is the war stuff in there because of Edmund Lowe? Anyway it doesn’t work. His character, Louis Beretti, is also supposed to be an Italian gangster and he seems neither.

It’s one of the first talkies from John Ford, one of the greatest directors of all time, and it’s poorly directed. Certain scenes are just characters gathering to say their lines in semi-stilted fashion, like grade school kids in a play. And it turns on one of the most improbable plot devices in movie history:

JUDGE SENTENCES GANGSTERS TO WORLD WAR I!!!

At the same time, it anticipates one of the great gangster movies, “The Roaring Twenties,” which came along just nine years later. By then, whatever was clumsy about this one was smooth.

Highways and byways
“Reckless” opens with an attempted jewelry store robbery, led by Louis Beretti, and when it goes awry and they make their getaway, he slips into working man’s overalls to fool the cops. Wait, or is it to fool his immigrant parents in the apartment above, so they think he’s got a regular job? I never figured that one out. 

In the apartment, he checks out his sister’s boyfriend to see if he’s a right guy, and he is. For some reason he brings him before the boys so they can give him the once-over, too. Why he would care what gangsters think of a civilian, I have no idea, but it’s not a bad scene. One guy—the guy who’s interested in the sister for himself—calls the boyfriend “Four Eyes,” and boyfriend tries to fight him. Beretti holds him back with amused admiration. “He’s got a little rooster in him at that!” he declares.

Shortly thereafter, he and some of his gang are fingered as the would-be jewel thieves and called before a judge in his chambers, with a fast-talking reporter, Bill O’Brien (Lee Tracy), present. I like how, when Beretti claims to be a trucker, a cop asks to look at his hands and dismisses him as never having done a day’s work in his life. So Beretti does the same with the cop: “No calluses on that hand, either,” he says. 

The judge—on what evidence?—keeps talking about sending them “up the river” (anticipating the title of Ford’s next film), but when their pockets are emptied of everything including draft cards, the reporter has a better idea:

Let ’em go to war. Great story: gangs, gunmen, turned loose, given a chance to do their bit! Patriotism, see? Safe for democracy. You’re a Democrat, aren’t you? You are. The primaries are next month, aren’t they? They are. Cardigan for City Court Judge: A Real Patriot. Get me?

He gets him.

Here's an odd moment: As they’re being led away, the Judge calls out “Wait a minute!” and Beretti says, “I knew there was a catch in it somewhere.” A catch? Dude, I think the catch is you have to go fight in a world war.

The comedy gets broader at training camp. Sgt. Ward Bond, in only his sixth film, is trying to figure out where to place a row of civilians into this man’s army. The dialogue feels like bits, punchlines, but they’re so specific to the time they go over my head. A ballplayer is made a noncom? A CPA becomes a horseshoer?

Sgt.: How about you?
Man: Lightweight.
Sgt.: Thug, huh?
Man: No, iceman.
Sgt.: [Turns to subordinate] Garbage detail.

No idea. 

One of Louis’ men, unable to think up a lie, admits his true profession, a “boiglar,” and they get excited and drag him away. When he returns, he says to Louis, “Lookit what they gimme,” and holds up a bugle. That one I got.

In the same overlong scene, we’re introduced to Frank Sheldon (Frank Albertson, the future Sam Wainwright), who seems cocky for no reason, and then Frank’s sister, Joan (Catherine Dale Owen, second-billed), to whom Louis takes a shine. Uncle Jim arrives, clothed in dark suit and pomposity, speechify about these fine young boys who have come “from the highways and the byways,”* until he realizes “Somebody swiped my watch!”

* “Highways and byways” reminded me of the opening narration of “Shazam!,” the 1970s Saturday morning live-action superhero TV show, and it made me wonder how long that phrase has been around. Per newspapers.com, it goes back to London in the 1820s. Its usage has faded, though: from 38k in newspapers in the 1930s, to 20k in the 1960s, to 15k in the 1990s to 5k last decade. And yes, some of this is because newspapers are dying. But so is the phrase.

In France, the jokes get worse. The boys play baseball and the French think the ball is a grenade. Louis tries to trade sugar for wine but his attempt to form the shape of a wine bottle with his hands is misinterpreted. Frank does a bit about “crossed ‘spoys” that he thinks is clever but no one else seems to get—including me. Everyone sings “Mademoiselle from Armentieres,” and when they are called into battle, “The Caisson Song,” followed by generic battle footage and a ticker-tape in NYC. And over there is over.

In the judge’s chambers, Louis tosses the medals of one of his men who didn’t make it, Donnelly (Mike Donlin), onto the table, but the moment is undercut by the fact that we don’t really know Donnelly. At home, Louis’ papa says Louis won the war, while his sister, Rosa (Marguerite Churchill), is wearing mourning clothes for her husband, who was killed, not in the war, but in a payroll robbery. From the gangster who liked the sister? Do we ever find that out?

Right, Frank/Sam Wainwright died, too, so Louis visits and commiserate with the sister. He’s just about to make his intentions known when she introduces him to her fiancé, played by a young, thin Randolph Scott. So that’s that. But he tells her: If she ever needs anything, she should come to him.

Believe it or not, we’re just 40 minutes in. Now Louis is running a swanky nightclub with his gang of toughs, including Big Shot (Warren Hymer), who’s been squealed on. After some back and forth, they figure out it was, OMG, Ritzy Reilly! Who’s that? You know, the spiffy ladies man who was looking at the French painting in the “Four Eyes” scene. Huh. Was he the guy who called the boyfriend “Four Eyes”? Nah, he was just looking at the painting.

The movie keeps doing this: trying to make us care about characters that have five seconds of screentime.

Ritzy winds up bragging about turning rat and gets a slug in the back, while Big gets the shortest prison term ever. Shortly thereafter, Joan’s child is kidnapped … by Big! What’s Louis going to do? Side with his lifelong pal or a woman he barely knows? Latter, of course.

It’s not all awful. After Louis gets the kid back, he confronts Big at his tavern in the wee hours, and we get a nice shot of Louis’ shadow crossing the swing doors. But then they do that slow-talking thing of early talkies (cf., Harlow in “The Public Enemy”), which serves as last-minute exposition that anticipates the Rocky/Jerry relationship in “Angels with Dirty Faces”:

Louis: I remember when we was kids together. The time I got that slug in the shoulder.
Big: All the other kids run away.
Louis: Yeah. It was you who took me to the hospital.
Big: You used to be a good guy, Louis.
Louis: Yeah. It’s tough.

When both men suddenly shoot at each other, the camera is propelled back out the swing doors—another nice shot. We hear a body drop and Louis makes his slow way out, clutching his stomach. Lee Tracy’s reporter shows up again—he’s been hanging at the bar a lot—to let Louis know the kid is safe and with his mother again. So Louis dies in peace.

Kidding. Both bartender and reporter realize Louis has been shot and call an ambulance.

Kidding. The reporter says “He’ll be alright” based on zero evidence, and calls for a drink for both of them, adding, with a knowing wink, “Hey Joe: Louis’ bottle.” And that bad joke ends our very spotty film.

Big shots
You see the “Roaring Twenties” comparison, right? Guy returns from Great War, opens a nightclub, has a thing for a girl who doesn’t love him, and risks everything to help her out of a jam. Eddie Bartlett dies onscreen, though, and given a literary sendoff: “He used to be a big shot.” Louis simply stands there, gut shot, amid winking jokes.

A lot of the film seems done on the cheap and it probably was. Fox Studios was overextended when the stock market crashed in Oct. 1929, which ultimately led to its merger with 20th Century Pictures a few years later. So Ford probably didn't have much dough to work with. In his book “Searching for John Ford,” Joseph McBride says a bigger problem was Ford’s co-director Andrew Bennison, “whose dialogue scenes are so wooden and tedious they make the entire film seem comatose.” Back then, studios didn’t know if their silent directors would work well with talkies and often subbed in newbies, and that even happened to John Ford. Turns out he wouldn't do badly with talkies.

Mouse over for the '31 original: same brick-patterned backdrop, same quote marks around titles, but a little blockier and duller, and with stars usurping writers and directors.

WARNING: SPOILERS

James Cagney was so popular in the 1930s that Warner Bros. glommed off his titles to sell lesser fare that had nothing to do with him. So we got “The Angels Wash Their Faces” (with the Dead End Kids and Ronald Reagan) a year after “Angels with Dirty Faces”; and so five years after “The Public Enemy,” and right around the time Cagney was leaving Warners for a stint with Grand National, we got “Public Enemy’s Wife,” starring Cagney pal Pat O’Brien and Cagney co-star Margaret Lindsay.

Lindsay’s the title character, while O’Brien is another mid-1930s G-Man—no-nonsense and hare-brained. And the public enemy in Cagney’s stead? None other than the original Joker, Cesar Romero, a mere stripling at 29. Not bad.

But it’s not good.

Palm Royal
It begins with a trial. Of the public enemy or his wife? That would make too much sense. It’s a guy named Correlli, who was involved in a crime that’s already put Gene Maroc (Romero) and his wife Judith (Lindsay) behind bars. Then we get a rush of newspapermen phoning in the verdict. I guess it’s a hung jury. (The “he” mentioned below is the DA):

• Journo 1: Sure he’s going to ask for a new trial. But he knows he can’t hang a thing on Correlli unless Maroc or his missus talk.
• Journo 2: So he’s going to the state prison to try to sweat it out of them.

At the state prison, in place of sweating, we’re introduced to a trio of female switchboard operators, all of whom are prisoners (was that a thing?), including our title character, the chipper, well-groomed Judith. Then she’s told to see the warden because she’s getting paroled. 

Initially I thought it was a scam to sweat her, but no, the warden believes she’s a good kid who got caught up with a bad actor. It’s the two G-Men hanging around his office, Lee Laird and Gene Ferguson (O’Brien and Robert Armstrong), who are suspicious—particularly Laird. He decides at this moment, just when Judith is about to walk, to grill her. She’s not having it. “I don’t care what you believe,” she snaps, “all I ask is to be let alone!” She pronounces it “ahsk.” Like any public enemy’s wife.

Laird might’ve believed her innocence if he’d eavesdropped on her farewell conversation with Maroc:

Maroc: Now get this, Judy: divorce or no divorce, you’re mine. That’s why they sent you here for something you didn’t do—I fixed that! So I’d know where you were every minute.

Judith: But you made one mistake: I’m out! And you’re still here.

A scene later, she’s socialite Judith Roberts, staying at the Palm Royal Hotel while being pursued by Tommy “Marrying” McKay (Dick Foran). True to his name, he wants to marry her, but she’s reluctant. Because of her past? Because she’s worried about Maroc? What kind of name is Maroc anyway? It’s how the French say Morocco, but I assume the writers got it by transposing the last two letters of “Marco.” Could none of them pick up a phone book? 

After their engagement winds up in the newspapers, replete with picture, Maroc hatches his escape plan. He says he’ll testify against Correlli, and as he’s being transported by train to the trial, a package delivered by a kindly old lady starts emitting a gas that puts everyone to sleep. Holy ’60s Batman plot device, Batman! Oddly, the one guy Maroc didn’t let in on the ploy was Correlli, who thinks he’s a rat and comes gunning for him. But car crash. 

Our G-Men show up at Judith’s suite with its black maid out of central casting. They still assume she’s in cahoots with Maroc; but in their presence she finally confesses to McKay her real name, background, and the danger he might be in. Laird, without acknowledging his error, pivots on a dime: The wedding will draw out Maroc! They have to go through with it! Which … Was putting civilians at risk in the FBI handbook back then?

At this point, we’re just 30 minutes. The movie is short but it takes for fucking ever.

At this point, too, we’re still wondering if Tommy is a right guy. He’s not. “You can’t expect me to marry an ex-convict!” he complains to the G-Men. Write the rest yourself:

• Laird will take McKay’s place at the altar
• They’ll fall in looooove

Bingo.

During the ceremony a car backfires, all the G-Men go for their guns, and Maroc realizes it’s a set-up. Now we get the honeymoon, with all of its sickly Code-era innuendo. Because yes, they’re actually married—they forgot to tell the minister it was a set-up—and still trying to draw out Maroc. Which they do. Suddenly he’s there, and, with Laird in the next room, he takes off with Judith.

Holed up at the Schwartzman Fishing Camp, waiting for a boat to Havana, Judith looks for a way to get word out. She’s smart about it: She cuts a telephone line, they send repairmen, they see her note. Those guys are smart, too: One guy shinnies up the pole and taps out what’s going on. Who’s not smart? The FBI, of course. Laird and Ferguson go into the joint pretending to be drunk fishermen but fool no one since their shoes are clean. They still get the drop on Maroc, but then his gang gets the drop on them, but then fights ensue, etc. Laird and Maroc fisticuff it out in the mud. Laird wins, Maroc dies. And in the end, no surprise, Laird and Judith realize they’ve fallen in love and kiss in the backseat of the car. The End.

The Joker before the Joker.

Never right
Apparently there was concern, at least in some quarters, that all these 1930s G-Men movies and radio shows were problematic.  “A vast mass of propaganda is being loosed to convince the American public that the agents of the Justice Department are invariably brave, never corruptible and always right,” wrote columnist Heywood Broun.

And yet, here anyway, the G-Men are almost never right. They suspect Judith is guilty when she’s innocent; they set up a wedding/honeymoon to trap the bad guy but don’t. In fact, he gets away with the girl right under their noses. And they only get their man because of the good work of telephone linemen. Maybe we needed a slew of movies about them?

I’m curious if this was intentional—if Warners, or its writers, didn’t like the Code, didn’t like having to switch from gangster protagonists, who were fun, to G-Men, who weren’t, and made them look bad. Two of its writers, Harold Buckley and P.J. Wolfson, wrote mostly slop; the third, Abem Finkel, the son of a famous actor of the Yiddish Theater, went on to help write “Jezebel” and “Sergeant York.” The director was the aptly named Nick Grinde, who mostly did B pictures.

Overall, Romero is good, Armstrong fun, O’Brien phones it in, and Margaret Lindsay is all wrong for the title role. The whole “ahsk” thing. She’s probably my least-favorite of the frequent Cagney co-stars. Under duress she’s not bad but if her character is doing OK her self-satisfaction is insufferable. Yet the studio kept trying to make her happen. She was the fetch of 1930s Warner Bros.

1930s “Fetch”

WARNING: SPOILERS

There’s a surreal quality to watching the original 1931 version of “The Maltese Falcon.” It’s like explaining a dream to a friend: You were you, but not really you. Here, Sam Spade is Sam Spade, but not really Humphrey Bogart. 

Actually, not at all Humphrey Bogart.

All his teeth
He’s Ricardo Cortez (nee Jacob Krantz), a wannabe Valentino by way of Zeppo Marx, and his Sam Spade isn’t exactly the cool, professional hero of John Huston’s 1941 classic. He’s a lothario—leering at the pre-code women with all his teeth.

At his office he kisses goodbye to a midday tryst (legs only) before nuzzling the neck of his semi-resistant secretary, Effie (Una Merkel), who then ushers in the movie’s femme fatale, Ruth Wonderly (Bebe Daniels), with the familiar line, “You’ll see her anyway—she’s a knockout.” In the midst of this he gets a call from Iva Archer (Thelma Todd of Marx Bros.’s fame), the pain-in-the-neck wife of his partner Miles Archer (Walter Long), and yes he’s banging Iva, too.

All of which makes us aware of the great lie in the ’41 version: Sam Spade is a skunk. Sure, no midday tryst, and he and Effie banter like pals, but he is banging his partner’s wife. That shit ain’t cool. But Bogie gets away with it because, well, he’s cool. He doesn’t leer at anyone or nuzzle anyone’s neck; he’s a professional throughout. Plus he’s friends with everyone in town: this cop, that cab driver, the other hotel dick. It’s the ’41 Miles Archer (Jerome Cowan) who acts the skunk—checking out Ruth Wonderly and all but going hubba hubba. “You’ve got brains—yes, you have,” Spade tells him sardonically, and next thing you know Archer is killed in cold blood and no one cares. He had $10k in insurance, Spade says, no children, and a wife that didn’t like him. Plus, we could add, a partner who couldn’t wait for the body to get cold before taking his name off the door.

The ’31 version of Archer is way more sympathetic. True, he’s got a face like a Mack truck, but when he overhears his wife confessing her love to his partner we feel his pain. Once Ruth leaves, we figure he’s going to wipe the floor with Sam. Instead:

Archer: Any phone calls for me, Sam?
Spade: Ohhhh, yes. Your wife called.
Archer: Yeah? What did she have to say?
Spade: Ohhhh, wanted to know when you were coming home. And she said she missed ya an awful lot!

Is that an unintended irony of the Production Code? When you sweep sex under the rug, you lose accountability. You lose morality. You kind of make it OK to covet thy neighbor’s wife. Way to go, Catholics.

Here, Archer’s body is found in a back alley near a chop suey joint—rather than down a construction site—but like with Bogart’s version Sam has no time to check on it. Unlike in the Bogart version, he stops and exchanges a few words of Cantonese with the owner of the chop suey joint, Lee Fu Gow. This is crucial info, it turns out. Spade now knows (even if we don’t) that Archer was killed by a woman. None of this was in the Huston version, by the way, because none of it was in the Dashiell Hammett novel. You can thank the ’31 screenwriters: Maude Fulton (“Other Men’s Women”), Brown Holmes (“I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang”) and an uncredited Lucien Hubbard (“Smart Money”).

There’s a lot of such little differences between films. We get no opening title cards about the Knight Templars of Malta and Charles V of Spain, we don’t see Archer being killed, there’s no shaking Wilmer's tail or booting him from the lobby of the Hotel Belvedere. Wilmer doesn’t even show up until the big meeting with Casper Gutman, and that meeting is a one-fer. Gutman begins it, then Joel Cairo shows up in the next room, returning to the fold, as it were, with intel that the black bird is arriving on the ship La Paloma, docking that day. So we better understand why Gutman slips Spade a mickey—he doesn’t need him anymore. What we don’t get is why Joel Cairo bothers to return to the fold. If he has the intel, why share it with the Fat Man?

Overall, there’s less playfulness with Cairo. Or the playfulness is Effie’s rather than the movie’s. She tells Sam he has a gorgeous new customer, and as Sam gets ready to sink his teeth in, in walks Joel Cairo (Otto Matieson). There’s no “Gardenia,” no lilt to the soundtrack, no supposition that he’s gay; and after Sam knocks him out there’s barely anything in his pockets. Just the wallet. Lorre has the wallet, three passports, foreign coin, a ticket to the Geary Theater and a scented handkerchief. (Cue lilt again.) He has a storyline in his pockets. He has a life. Plus he’s played by Peter Lorre. (No offense to Matieson, a Dane who played Napoleon Bonaparte several times in the silents.) Gutman, meanwhile, is played quite sweatily by Dudley Digges, who is memorable as the evil “boys prison” warden in “The Mayor of Hell.” Wilmer? That’s Dwight Frye, the original Renfield in Universal horror flicks, as well as Dr. Frankenstein’s assistant (Fritz/Karl) in the first Frankenstein films. They’re no slouches, in other words. They're also not Lorre, Sidney Greenstreet and Elisha Cook, Jr. Not close.

One improvement? While Mary Astor is great at playing a school-marmish type who can suddenly get into a catfight with Lorre’s Joel Cairo, I have trouble seeing Bogart’s Spade losing his heart to her. She’s not the “knockout” she’s made out to be. Bebe Daniels is closer to that, and Cortez’s Spade doesn’t really fall for her that hard. It’s more lust than love. Daniels, who played the star who has to break her ankle so Ruby Keeler can rise in “42nd Street,” was 30 years old at the time, but had been acting in movies for more than 20 years. In 1910, in just her second movie, she played Dorothy Gale in a short version of “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.” One wonders if she was destined to play roles that, in later, better productions, would be made more famous by someone else.

Repping SF
And the hits keep coming—if slightly off-key:

• “We didn’t believe you, we believed your $200.”
• “You’re pretty good. As a matter of fact, you’re very good. It’s chiefly your eyes, I think, and the throb you get in your voice when you say, ‘Oh, be generous, Mr. Spade.’”
• “A statuette. The black figure of a ... bird.”
• “Permit me to remind you, Mr. Spade, you may have the falcon, but we most certainly have you.”
• “Why, I feel toward Wilmer exactly as if he were my own son.”
• “You palmed it, Gutman. ... I said you palmed it.” 

Each line is great, but you miss Greenstreet’s harrumph, Lorre’s whine, Bogart’s cool.

The ’31 version is directed by Roy Del Ruth, who directed some good early Cagneys (“Blonde Crazy,” “Taxi!”) and crappy later ones (“West Point Story,” “Starlift”), and it’s still early in the sound era so the camera doesn’t do much. Everything feels two dimensional. It’s straight-on shots, often with just one person in the camera frame. There’s no sense of humor to the movie, and no sense of tragedy. When the Falcon is finally uncovered, there’s nothing monumental about it. You don’t lean in the way you do in the Huston version. And that great ending, where the elevator gate clangs shut on Mary Astor like the bars of a jail cell, and then descends as if into hell while the soundtrack pounds, well, there’s nothing close to that here. Huston ended it like the best of Hitchcock—ripping the Band-Aid off—while this one just keeps going. Spade, now the chief investigator for the DA’s office, visits a disheveled Ruth/Brigette in her cell, and she tries to coax some of her moxie back. No go. Afterwards, he privately tells the female guard to give her everything she wants. When the guard asks where to send the bill, his mood becomes oddly buoyant: “The district attorney’s office!” he practically shouts. Not exactly “The stuff dreams are made of.”

Oh, another difference? How they open the film. How do you let viewers know we're in San Francisco? Huston opens with a nice shot of the Golden Gate Bridge. Of course. They don't do that here or the simple reason the Golden Gate Bridge didn’t exist in 1931. They began building it in ’33 and it opened to traffic in ’37. So what repped San Francisco in 1931? The Ferry Building.

SLIDESHOW

Robinson, finally cast in a starring non-gangster role, but someone else steals the show.

WARNING: SPOILERS

It’s got one of those great character intros, like Rick in “Casablanca,” where we keep hearing about the guy without seeing him. He keeps getting built up by others. When we do finally meet tabloid newspaper editor Joseph W. Randall (Edward G. Robinson), after about 10 minutes of screen time, he’s washing his hands in a speakeasy bathroom. The speakeasy and hand-washing are both symptoms of the same problem: he hates his job. The speakeasy dulls whatever the soap can’t wash away.

This was the first non-gangster starring role for Robinson after he hit it big with “Little Caesar,” and maybe as a result it was beloved by him. In his autobiography he calls it one of his favorite films. “I loved Randall because he wasn’t a gangster,” he wrote. “I suspect he was conceived as an Anglo-Saxon—to look at me nobody would believe it—but I enjoyed doing him. He made sense…”

Yes and no. From the opener, you get a sense of a man trying to drag his newspaper out of the muck. “Randall’s getting too swell for the chewing gum trade,” is one comment from the New York Evening Gazette’s head of circulation. (I love “chewing gum trade.”) The business side wants sensationalism and he’s giving them League of Nations cables. But circulation is down. Sales are down. “Our weak spot is the editorial department! Randall needs a good jacking up!”

Those are the battle lines, drawn early. The trouble? We never see Randall trying to go highbrow. He’s pressured to do a low-rent thing, does it, and people get hurt. That’s the movie.

Besides, by the time he shows up, we’ve already been introduced to someone way more interesting.

Goldboig
The efficient, sardonic secretary who knows more than her boss, and maybe loves him a little, was a kind of 1930s Warner Bros. staple, wasn’t she? I guess I’m thinking Joan Blondell in “Footlight Parade.” And here.

Here, she’s Miss Taylor (Aline MacMahon), no first name, and she immediately stands out. It’s partly her lines and partly the way MacMahon says them. The people around her are a bit broad. Chicago flapper Kitty Carmody (Ona Munson), for example, shows up, vamps a bit, pours herself into a chair, and talks up how the publisher, “Mr. Hinchcliffe” (Oscar Apfel), wants to hire her. “What I meant about Mr. Hinchecliffe is that he knows that I've had a lot of experience in Chicago,” she says. “Yeah, you look it,” Miss Taylor responds, accepting her as a fait accompli but dispensing with her. 

But it’s the back-and-forth with young gofer Arthur Goldberg (Harold Waldridge) that takes things to another level.

Arthur Goldberg: Sufferin’ Moses, but Mr. Randall's got a lot of women.
Miss Taylor: Arthur Goldboig, ain’t you got no religion?
Arthur Goldberg: Gee, the way you say that, I ought to change my name.
Miss Taylor: Don’t you do it, kid. New York’s too full of Christians as it is.

“Five Star Final” is based upon a play by former New York Evening Graphic editor Louis Weitzenkorn, and was adapted by Robert Lord and Byron Morgan, so you wonder who came up with the “Christians” line and how it was allowed to stick. It’s so great. The pre-code era certainly helped. Three years later, no way Joe Breen is letting that line through. You wonder how many great lines got killed between 1934 and 1966. Or to today.

More, though, it’s the unforced way MacMahon says it. She says it with camaraderie, like it’s a little secret between her and little Arthur Goldboig. It’s almost maternal. Plus, she never stops working. Through both conversations. She’s taking phone calls and filling in notes in a kind of rolodex for her boss. Everyone else shows up, ta da, like they’re in a play, and annunciates like in a play—like the lines are the job. She has a job; the lines she does for free.

And this was her first movie? Just who is Aline MacMahon?

Turns out: An early practitioner of the Stanislavski method of acting, soon to be known simply as The Method. She learned it in the 1920s, became a star on Broadway shortly thereafter, married a well-known architect, Clarence Stein, and, after Hollywood tapped her, commuted between New York and LA. In the mid-1930s, Warner Bros. kept pairing her opposite Guy Kibbee, including as the maternal, cynical Trixie Lorraine in “Gold Diggers of 1933.” In the 1940s, she was nominated for an Oscar for “Dragon Seed,” with Katherine Hepburn and Walter Huston. In the 1950s, she was blacklisted. She’s also the subject of a recent book by John Strangeland: “Aline MacMahon: Hollywood, the Blacklist, and the Birth of Method Acting” (University Press of Kentucky). A 2023 review of Strangeland’s work, as well as an appreciation of MacMahon’s, can be found in The New York Review of Books, for those who subscribe.

Anyway, you can’t help but notice her here. She’s the most natural actor with the best lines.

The plot revolves around resurrecting a 20-year-old murder case, in which a woman, Nancy Voorhes, killed her boss after he impregnated her and reneged on marriage. It was a bit scandal but she was acquitted, and Hinchcliffe figures the public will want to know what happened to her. Randall, who covered the case as a reporter, isn’t exactly highbrow here. He works the phones, then assigns Kitty Carmody and handsy reporter T. Vernon Isopod (Boris Karloff, in one of his last roles before “Frankenstein”) to figure out what’s what, then goes to wash his hands again. Miss Taylor? She’s leaving for the day. But she offers this parting shot about the whole nasty business:

I think you can always get people interested in the crucifixion of a woman.

 Man, I wish I’d had that line in my back pocket in 2016.

For a Chicago flapper, and a handsy ex-priest, Carmody and Isopod make not-poor reporters. They quickly find out Nancy Voorhes is now Nancy Townsend (Frances Starr), wife of Michael (H.B. Warner), and an upstanding member of society living uptown. Hubby knows about her sordid past but her child, Jenny (Marian Marsh), doesn’t. Jenny also thinks Michael is her biological father. And as luck would have it—at least for the tabloid business—Jenny is days from a big wedding to Phillip Weeks (Anthony Bushell) of the hoity-toity Weeks family.

Once the tumblers of the plot begin to fall into place, the movie gets a lot less interesting. They run with the story, circulation jumps, but Nancy is scandalized. She finds out before her daughter and works the phones to try to rein in the rest of the story (it’s supposed to be a series), but no one will take her calls. Finally, Miss Taylor forces the call on Randall, who, distracted and guilty, tells her the story is already out. Then we get melodrama: Nancy kills herself, off-stage in the bathroom, and her husband finds the body. When Jenny and Phillip show up, giddy about their upcoming nuptials, he keeps the news from them, and after they leave, moving and speaking slowly, he joins his wife in death.

It's Kitty Carmody, climbing through the living room window with a photographer, who finds the bodies. Big story for the five star final—the last paper of the day. Except now the scandal threatens to engulf the entire newspaper since they come off so badly. We get a big confrontation in Randall’s office. A distraught Jenny shows up with a gun, demanding to know why they killed her mother. Randall, guilt-ridden, tells her she was killed for circulation and almost dies for voicing the truth. But Phillip Weeks, ever loyal, prevents Jenny from committing the crime and they leave to start their own life. Then Randall tells off Hinchcliffe and leaves with Miss Taylor. And in the final shot—reminiscent of the final shots of the silent film “Chicago”—the headlines that caused all the trouble are seen being washed away into a storm drain. Yesterday’s news.

King of druggists
Life moved fast back then. For the filmmakers, I mean. Louis Weitzenkorn’s play debuted on Broadway on Dec. 30, 1930, and this movie hit theaters in September 1931. So rights were bought, the play adapted, director chosen, people cast, filming done, publicity created, etc. etc.—all in nine months. Probably why the framing of the play—set scenes, from which people come and go—is very play-like. Not much of an attempt to open things up. 

Something else I learned while besides all that stuff about MacMahon? The good-guy husband of Nancy Townsend who takes his own life is played by H.B. Warner, who was perhaps the most famous silent-era Jesus, in Cecil B. DeMille’s “The King of Kings” (1927). But that’s not his most famous role to contemporary audiences, since, 16 years after this, he played Mr. Gower, the druggist, in “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Which means … Mr. Gower was Jesus.

“Five Star Final” was directed by Mervyn LeRoy, and, again, it’s not bad before it descends into melodrama. It’s about the media tsk-tsking as it sells sex. That kind of hypocrisy will last beyond newspapers.

The great Aline MacMahon, and a line for the ages.

WARNING: SPOILERS

So is it “Public Hero Number 1” or abbreviated to “No. 1”? Or hashtagged “#1”? Even MGM couldn't decide. It went hashtag for the title card, abbreviation in the trailer, and completely spelled out for the posters. The confusion continues to this day: Wikipedia goes hashtag, AFI abbreviation, IMDb spells it out. Thanks for the clarification.

I thought the title wordplay was at least original but it turns out not. In the wake of the “Public Enemy No. 1” coinage (circa 1930, for Al Capone), the press, for a time, trotted out its opposite. These are among those touted “Public Hero No. 1” in newspapers in the mid-1930s: Charles Lindbergh, Dizzy Dean, J. Edgar Hoover, and—interestingly—John Dillinger, whose bank-robbing exploits were cheered on in the midst of the Great Depression, and whose story elements are in this thing. 

That’s what drew me to the movie in the first place—hearing it was about Dillinger—but it's not. Not really. Yes, we get a shootout in a lodge in rural Wisconsin called “Little Paree,” rather than Dillinger’s “Little Bohemia”; and the main baddie, Sonny Black (Joseph Calleia), is gunned down outside a movie theater the way Dillinger was, but it's in Madison, Wis., rather than Chicago, Ill. That's as close as we get. Black’s gang is actually called “the Purple Gang,” a real 1920s mob that had nothing to do with Dillinger.

We don’t get much Dillinger because you couldn’t even say Dillinger in Hollywood movies in 1935. According to Thomas Doherty in his book Hollywood’s Censor: Joseph I. Breen and the Production Code Administration, the normally wishy-washy Will Hays had “squelched the trigger-happy gangster cycle with a ukase against storylines inspired by John Dillinger.” This was in 1932, two years before the Production Code grew teeth. Why it worked in this instance and almost nowhere else, I don’t know. Why an edict against Dillinger squelched the gangster cycle, I don’t know, either, but squelched it was. After James Cagney’s great turn as Tom Powers in “The Public Enemy,” for example, he was cast more often as grifter than gangster. If he began a movie as a gangster, his arc was toward respectability: reporter in “Picture Snatcher”; movie star in “Lady Killer”; juvenile prison reformer in “The Mayor of Hell.”

Once the code grew teeth in July 1934, all the studios rushed to turn their charismatic gangsters into cops. Warner Bros. actually beat MGM to the punch by a few weeks. “G-Men,” with Cagney, was released May 4, 1935; this one, “Public Hero,” with Chester Morris (a gangster in “Alibi” and “The Big House”), came out May 31.

“G-Men” was better.

Drunk docs and crazy coincidences
Morris plays Jeff Crane, a new, loudmouth convict in prison, who is stuck in a cell with Sonny, the suspected leader of the “Purple Gang,” who quickly puts him in his place. But Crane learns no lesson and before long gets 21 days in solitary. Afterward, still learning no lesson, he’s got a scheme about breaking out, and does, and brings Sonny along. Except Sonny gets shot and a doctor is needed. Luckily, Sonny has one: Dr. Josiah Glass (Lionel Barrymore). Unluckily, he’s a drunk. Since this is the 1930s, it’s played for laughs.

On the way to deliver the drunk doc, Crane nearly runs into a bus that skids off the side of the road. On board? A crazily persistent woman named Maria Theresa “Terry” O’Reilly (Jean Arthur), who insists Crane take the stranded passengers back to town. He does, griping all the way. Then she insists he take her to the next town. He doesn’t. But a bridge is washed out, there’s delays, she stows away in his car, etc. That’s how they stay together.

So what’s her deal anyway? She’s trying to hook up with her brother, Dinkie, about an inheritance. And who’s this Dinkie when he’s at home? Yes, it’s Sonny Black. What a crazy coincidence—running into Sonny’s sister when he’s taking a drunk doc to remove a bullet from Sonny. She doesn’t know her brother is a gangster, either. She’s innocent. She’s Jean Arthur.

But she does think that Crane is a gangster, even though, by and by, we realize he’s an undercover fed who is out to get Sonny and bring down the Purple Gang. That’s why he acted so over-the-top in prison. Because he was acting.

Much of the rest of the movie is Crane trying not to fall in love with Terry before he betrays her brother. But when bro slaps her, Crane decks him. For that, Crane loses two gigs. He’s tossed out of the Purple Gang, and then, because his punch wasted months of undercover work, he’s also tossed out of the Bureau, too. Ah, but then he tricks Dr. Glass into taking him to Little Paree, notifies his stickler boss, Special Agent James Duff (one-time real-life convict Paul Kelly), where Little Paree is, and the feds descend. There’s a shootout, Doc gets it, but before dying he reveals that, yes, Sonny is their leader. A few months later, Sonny gets his outside the movie theater where Terry works. Crane pulls the trigger.

Now he just has to win Terry back, and does, kinda, on a train in the last two minutes of the film. It’s not good. You feel for her need to get away. It’s a little creepy.

Sour-pussed sticklers
All of which points out the difficulty of Hollywood shifting gears and ignoring its charismatic anti-heroes for tight-assed, puritanical law enforcement. MGM is trying to make the feds look good here, right? So why do they come off so poorly? They drop Crane at the drop of a hat then welcome him back when he solves everything? Not cool.

Some part of me wonders if the studios weren’t trying hard enough on purpose. I.e., they saw law enforcement as an extension of the puritanical Joe Breen and the Production Code Administration and portrayed them as they were: sour-pussed sticklers, gumming up the works.

Barrymore gets top billing here despite barely being in it, while Arthur is second-billed though you don’t see her for a half hour. That felt odd: watching a movie and not seeing either of the top two stars for 30 minutes. Morris is fine but he’s no Cagney. He’s not even the Morris of “The Big House.” I liked the Morris of “The Big House.”

As for Sonny Black? It took me a while to realize why the actor’s name, Joseph Calleia, was so familiar. Twenty-three years later, he played Sgt. Pete Menzies, the man you could argue (as I did) is the true hero of Orson Welles’ great noir, “Touch of Evil.” Make sure you see the director’s cut.

Dee with Dietrich lighting; Dalton Trumbo called her character “a thrill-seeking little bitch.” 

WARNING: SPOILERS

This came onto my radar because of a good chapter on writer-director Rowland Brown in Philippe Garnier’s book “Scoundrels & Spitballers: Writers and Hollywood in the 1930s.” Except I can’t remember if the movie sounded interesting or Brown did. Stuff like this keeps happening to me. My streaming queues, for example, are filled with films that were part of some important late-night research, but now I look at them and go, “Um … OK?” Whatever rationale I had for watching them is gone.

“Blood Money” isn’t great but it deserves a wider audience and a better print. (I watched it via an avi file on my computer—not ideal.) The film gets into class issues, and gender issues, and it has wit and a cynical sense of the world. People want what’s bad for them and run toward ruin with open arms. Sadly, we get a happy ending.

A thrill-seeking little bitch
We keep hearing about our main character before seeing him. (Cf., Rick in “Casablanca.”) A wife betrays her husband to the cops, he belts her, then tells her to get Bill Bailey on the line. A judge is awakened in the middle of the night with a bond request. “That Bill Bailey has a lot of nerve!” the wife says. Then it’s onto the working class. A butcher, weighing sausages, says Bill Bailey ordered 150 turkeys for Thanksgiving. For charity? “Sure,” he responds. “For our poor judges, our poor lawyers, and our poor police officers.”

When we finally see the man (George Bancroft), he’s ringside at a prizefight, sponsoring a boxer with the just-sitting-there slogan “Bailey for Bail.” When someone says he hasn’t picked a winner all night, he smiles and says, “I make all my money off losers.”

So there he is: a Tammany Hall-type grifter with the world wrapped around his finger. What brings him low? A woman, of course.

She’s a new client who needs $1.5k bail and uses a $6k ring for collateral. That sends his antennae up. She says her name is “Jane Smith” (up again), and, eavesdropping, he discovers she’s from money: Elaine Talbert (Frances Dee), the daughter of the president of a Hawaiian pineapple company. She’s also wild—someone who steals for the thrill of it. Example: While he’s helping her post bail, she lifts his cigarette lighter. Later, when they’re going for burgers and onions, and she lights her cigarette, he takes it, sees it’s his—inscribed to him from Jack Dempsey—and gives her a look. Suddenly she’s in her element. She leans back with a saucy smile and  “So … what?” 

Dee is dynamite—both senses. She has a lovely neck, and can play both good girl and bad. The good is a front. The bad is, too, in its own way. She wants to be bad but she also wants to be punished. “I want a man who’s my master, who isn't afraid of anybody in the world, who’d shoot the first man that looked at me,” she tells Bailey at a Hawaiian luau on her father’s estate.” If only a man would give her a thrashing, she adds, “I’d follow him around like a dog on a leash.” In his review in The Spectator, Dalton Trumbo called her “a thrill-seeking little bitch.”

Bailey’s response to all this? He falls for her like a sap. He turns into the opposite of what she wants.

When does he fall? That’s a good question. Earlier we see him hanging with Ruby Darling, a laconic female gangster/nightclub owner played by Judith Anderson in her film debut. (Yes, Mrs. Danvers from “Rebecca” is the initial love interest.) “Aw, Ruby,” he tells her, “I could never get stuck on any girl but you.” But then Elaine shows up. What tips him? When she wants her burger smothered in onions, and he says he always wanted to meet a girl who really liked onions? When she steals his lighter? The longer they’re together, the less interesting he becomes. It’s called love.

At the dog-race track, Bailey buys a dog for her and she’s beside herself with joy; when the dog finishes last, she mutters, “Where’d you get that mutt?” In a sense, the dog is Bailey. As soon as he introduces her to a sleeker model, Ruby’s brother Drury (Chick Chandler), a bank robber known as the “Lone Bandit,” her eyes get like saucers, and Bailey becomes the mutt. There’s a nice scene later at a golf course when Bailey and Drury make calls in adjacent phone booths—both to her. Another nice scene occurs after Elaine kisses Drury goodnight on the cheek and he returns to his apartment building—to find Bailey standing in the shadows. Does Bailey know? Is he angry? Neither. He’s solicitous. While dabbing the lipstick off his cheek with a handkerchief, he warns that the cops are closing in and Drury should jump bail and leave the country. 

Drury: I think I’ll go to Russia.
Bailey (chuckles): They’ll put you to work there…

Instead Drury lams it with Elaine, but beforehand tells her to take the $50k to pay Bailey for the bond he’s jumping, then destroy the $300k in worthless registered bonds he stole. Except she gives him the bad bonds, and that’s the bonehead move that sets up the rest of the film. Thinking himself betrayed, Bailey works with the cops to bring Drury back. So Ruby calls a meeting to call out her protégé/lover, and the gangsters gang up on Bailey. They tell everyone to jump bail so it’ll sink Bailey’s business; then his safe is blown up and the stolen bonds are found. Now he’s looking at jail time himself.

But—final reel—Drury find outs how Elaine betrayed Bailey, sends word to sis, and she rushes to save Bailey before an eight ball laden with explosives (yes) blows up in his face. “You’ll always be getting behind an eight ball, darling,” she says, as they kiss and make up, “and I’ll always be pulling you out.”

That’s the dull part. The part that sticks is our final scenes with the thrill-seeking little bitch. Elaine shows up at Bailey’s, too, just in time to see the kiss, and when she leaves she bumps into a woman who’s distraught because a man placed an ad for a modeling gig then pawed her. “My arms are black and blue!” she cries. Which is when Elaine’s eyes light up, she grabs the ad, and off she goes—toward what she’d always wanted.

Decking Dempsey
“Blood Money” is from 20th Century Studio, pre-Fox, and produced by Darryl Zanuck, post-Warners. In its trivia section on the film, IMDb lists several of the film’s debuts and finales: 

• Adalyn Doyle's debut
• Frances Dunn's debut
• Final film of Sandra Shaw
• Final film of Blossom Seeley
• Theatrical movie debut of Dame Judith Anderson  

Beyond Anderson, most of these are bit players—save Blossom Seeley, who was a big star as a San Francisco jazz singer in the 1910s. In Ruby’s nightclub, she belts out “San Francisco Bay” and “Melancholy Baby.”

At the luau, we also get a sexy hula dance from an actress named Grace Poggi, who was only 19 at the time, and only made 15 films, usually as a dancer. She pops.

The big problem with the movie may be the lead. I loved Bancroft in Sternberg’s “Underworld” but he’s hardly a leading-man type. He’s good with bluster and brutism but not affairs of the heart. This movie doesn’t play to his strengths. 

The previous films Brown directed were “Quick Millions” with Spencer Tracy and “Hell’s Highway” with Richard Dix. Would love to see both. He also wrote for two Cagney films, “The Doorway to Hell” and “Angels with Dirty Faces,” and is given credit, by Pat O’Brien at least, for much of what was good with the latter. “Brown wrote it, no doubt about this,” O’Brien said in 1975. “He was sort of a genius, that guy. … He talked to you like a stevedore would, in plain old everyday American.” Brown is also one of the two screenwriters (among eight writing credits altogether) on the Constance Bennett movie “What Price Hollywood?” which is basically ur-“A Star is Born.”

Brown had gangster connections, or didn’t, drank too much, or not at all, and once sparred with Jack Dempsey and maybe knocked him down. Even Garnier has a tough time getting a handle on him. Either way, “Blood Money” is the last time Brown got credited as director. He was either fired a week into “The Devil is a Sissy,” or filmed the whole thing but was told by Eddie Mannix that MGM’s go-to director W.S. Van Dyke would get credit because his name would sell better. So Brown hit Mannix—either with a phone book or the script—and there went directing. And now he was on the downhill side. That price, Hollywood.

WARNING: SPOILERS

Considering its historic importance—the first feature film for both Humphrey Bogart and Spencer Tracy, not to mention directed by John Ford and based on a story by Maurine Dallas Watkins, who wrote “Chicago”—Amazon.com treats “Up the River” rather shabbily. The version I streamed for $3.98 was not only blurry but chopped up. It kept skipping bits of dialogue. Nips here, tucks there. The movie is suppose to run 92 minutes but the version I streamed was 84, so I lost eight minutes. Two to five seconds at a time.

It's another 1930 prison movie—there were a lot of those—but this one’s a comedy-romance. Saint Louis is a gangster, while Steve Jordan is a nice-guy inmate who falls for a female prisoner. Guess who plays who? Right. Tracy is the gangster, Bogie the romantic interest. They didn’t know who these guys were yet.

G-rated Shawshank
The third lead is Warren Hymer as Dannemora Dan, a malaprop-laden foil for Saint Louis. The movie begins with them breaking out of a prison in the South, but when Dan implies he’s going straight and starting a chicken farm, Louis leaves him high and dry. So long, sucker!

They next meet when Dan is a member of the Brotherhood of Hope, a Salvation Army type group, and he’s in the midst of telling how he came to be saved when Louis pulls up in a big car with two dames and a shit-eating grin. “And verily,” Dan intones, “I say to you, the wages of sin is—a punch in the jaw, you louse!”

Cut to: Bensonatta, “A penitentiary in the Middle West,” a title card tells us, where the cons jeer the newcomers like in a G-rated “Shawshank Redemption”:

• “Oh, look at the mug on that guy.”
• “Look at that pan!”
• “What did you do, boy, rob your mama’s bank?”

Claire Luce plays Judy Fields, the romantic interest, and she’s willowy and lovely to look at but conveys little. She also doesn’t seem like much a con—hardened or otherwise. When she’s released and Louis asks about her plans, she says brightly, “I’ll go back to the old racket, I suppose,” and you believe exactly zero of it.

She’s also not that Claire Luce. For some reason, I thought Clare (no “i”) Booth was an actress before marrying Henry Luce, but she was socialite and playwright (“The Women”), and then went on to become a U.S. rep (CT-4th), ambassador to Italy (under Ike), and, with hubby, strong, stupid supporter of Chiang Kai-shek. Claire with an “i” had a short career in Hollywood and a fairly long one on Broadway. Among her stage roles: Curley’s wife in “Of Mice and Men” (1937-38) and Katharina in “The Taming of the Shrew” (1951).

The plot here isn’t much and isn’t the point. Steve is paroled and promises to wait for Judy, and Louis and Dan break out of prison and wind up helping Steve. Seems the reason Judy wound up in the can was a con artist named Frosby (Morgan Wallace), who shows up in Steve’s New England town and blackmails him into staying mum about a stock investment scheme. But when Frosby scams Steve’s mom, Steve grabs a gun. Saint Louis grabs it back. “It’s a sucker’s game,” he says, and talks about friends on death row who were there one day and not the next. Instead, they just steal the bonds back from Thursby. I mean, Frosby. Sorry. Every time Bogie said “Frosby” here, I couldn’t help but think of Bogie saying “Thursby” in “The Maltese Falcon.” 

Steve gives the two men a message for Judy but Dan loses it on the train back. They show up worse for wear just as Judy is being released, and just in time for the big baseball game run by Pop (William Collier Sr.). The movie ends with them taking their positions as battery mates as the newly energized prisoners sing the title song:

Rolling home like a beautiful song
Rolling home up the river
Where you belong

Oddities and not-oddities
If the plot isn’t the point, what is? Personality. It’s poor, dumb Dan forever losing out to the charismatic Saint Louis. Tracy’s character has a catchphrase, “I never break my word,” which he constantly does. That’s the gag.

Louis: Tell you what, I’ll give you my word. And you know I never break my word.
Warden: No?
Louis: Well, never twice in succession.

Future Ford mainstay Ward Bond also shows up as prison bully with undertones of sexual violence. “What are you gonna do—make a favorite of that punk around here?” Bond growls at Bogie. “Say, who are you to tell me to keep my hands off anybody?” he growls again before getting decked by Louis. You get a sense Ford knows what happens in prisons.

There’s oddities. The warden’s daughter Jean (Joan Lawes), who’s about 8 or 10 years old, is always hanging in the prison yard. Sure, what could go wrong? The oddest moment may be in Steve’s New England town, when twin sisters May and June (Elizabeth and Helen Keating) burst in to dinner with news of a hayride. They’re dressed alike and they speak in unison? It’s like “The Shining” but played for laughs.

We also get some not-oddities for the period: society matrons sticking their noses in; Judy calling Frosby a “dirty rat”; blackface. The big crowd-pleaser at a prison talent show is a minstrel routine, “Black ‘n’ Blue,” with Amos ‘n’ Andy-type dialogue. A Black con in the audience roars with laughter. “See?” Ford seems to be saying. “They like it, too.”

I do like Hymer, who played not-smart throughout the 1930s, then ruined his career with a not-smart move: urinating on the desk of movie mogul Harry Cohn. Here, at that New England dinner, Dan is sitting next to Bogie’s sister, but when the twins arrive seats are shuffled and he loses his spot to—of course—Louis. Now he has nowhere to sit. After pouting a bit, and with nowhere to go, he simply slips behind a dressing screen in the corner and sits on a stool there, hoping to not be noticed. It felt like me at half the parties I was at in my teens.

WARNING: SPOILERS

What a weird fucking movie.

In the first half, a wife realizes her husband is unfaithful and it’s treated as a comedy. In the second half, she wins the husband back and it’s treated as a tragedy. Well, it’s an ur-disaster flick so it is a tragedy. It’s the Hindenburg before the Hindenburg, let alone The Hindenburg. There’s a golden calf element, too—outré revelry before fierce judgment—but then it was directed by Cecil B. DeMille, who did both the silent and Charlton Heston versions of “The Ten Commandments,” and who was always big on bacchanalia followed by shame. Lots of bacchanalia, a bit of shame.

You could also say the movie is ripped from the headlines: A dirigible full of rich, partying people crash. That pretty much describes the 1920s. At least these people had parachutes.

And it’s a musical! DeMille’s first and only. It shows.

Regular old crackers
I didn’t know it was a musical, so, 15 minutes in, when the maid (Elsa Peterson) bursts into “Live and Love Today” to her mistress Angela Brooks (Kay Johnson), bucking her up about her philandering husband Bob (Reginald Denny), I experienced the kind of disconnect people who hate musicals have about musicals. Is it the only time in the movie the singing is musical-y? It’s not a performer with a piano saying “Hey, I’ll sing a song here.” It’s an everyday setting where someone just starts belting it out. 

This scene follows an extended comedic open in which Bob and his pal Jimmy Wade (Roland Young) try to sneak back into his stately mansion, drunk, in top hats and tails, after a night of revelry. Jimmy is clumsy and keeps dropping stuff, including his top hat, which winds up on the head of a passing maid. Wucka wucka. But Angela discovers more than just the revelry. She realizes Bob is having an affair with a dame named Trixie (Lillian Roth) and confronts him about it. His response? He blames her.

• “Don’t you understand? Love can’t be kept in cold storage. Its a battery that has to be recharged every day.”
• “That’s you all over: cold logic. … I think you're above all other women. But below zero.”
• “I’m a romantic guy. I crave warm affection … and all I get is frozen justice.”

We also get this back-and-forth:

Bob: You don't know what love means.
Angela: You don't know what marriage means.
Bob: Oh, yes I do! It’s a schoolroom and you’re the teacher. Well, I’ve graduated!

Was male privilege ever more ascendant? 

Was DeMille a philanderer? Of course he was. With several women. And his wife knew. And did nothing. Probably just sang songs with her maid.

Oddly, given the above, the screenwriters are all women—Jeanie Macpherson, Gladys Unger, Elsie Janis—and all of them previously collaborated with DeMille. Particularly Macpherson. She had a longtime affair with him. So I guess they knew from which they wrote.

After confronting Bob, Angela confronts Trixie, but gets similarly dismissed and humiliated. So she divorces Bob and takes him to the cleaners.

Kidding. She decides to fight for him. This is what she says to Trixie: “You made him sick of virtue, I'll make him so sick of vice he’ll scream for decency!” How does she do this? That’s the second half of the film. Jimmy is throwing a masked ball aboard a moored dirigible and she decides to show up in the slinkiest outfit ever and turns heads—especially Bob’s, who pushes others aside to get to the front of the line. Just who is this mysterious woman who calls herself Madam Satan? He must know!

There’s some not-bad lines but Bob is a major creep and the movie doesn’t think so. Plus Angela’s plan to get him so sick of vice he’ll scream for decency is a non-starter. He seems very interested in vice until he realizes the vice would be with his wife. Where’s the fun in that? At which point whatever might’ve happened is disrupted by disaster. There’s a thunderstorm, the dirigible becomes unmoored and begins to break apart, and panic ensues among the swanky set. “I don’t want your husband,” Trixie cries, “I want a parachute!” Bob meanwhile, sacrifices his parachute for Angela but he survives like an action hero. As the ship is going down, at the last second, he dives into the city reservoir. Sure.

If his landing is heroic, for almost everyone else it’s comic: Angela parachutes into a car where a couple is making out, Trixie into a Turkish bath, and Jimmy into a tree in the lion’s den in a zoo. Wucka. 

Animal crackers
It is insane, though. At the gala, most of the women dress slinky (as cats, etc.) or outrageous (peacock-like), while most of the men show up as dashing Douglas Fairbanks types—including Bob as Robin Hood, arms akimbo. We also get a Roman senator, a pirate, Romeo, Eve, Fish Girl, Spider Girl, Victory, Electricity, Miss Conning Tower and Little Rolls Riding Hood. You can get a sense of the madness in this clip.

Roth, the woman who plays Trixie, was immediately familiar to me as the daughter to Margaret Dumont’s Mrs. Rittenhouse in the Marx Bros.’ classic “Animal Crackers.” There, as the loyal girlfriend, she overacts. Here, as the other woman, she’s not bad. But her career quickly sputtered from alcoholism. She recovered enough to write about a memoir about it, “I’ll Cry Tomorrow,” which was adapted into a 1955 Susan Hayward film of the same name.

The movie was a rare box-office bomb for DeMille—deserved. It’s overlong and feels longer. It debuted about a year after the Wall Street Crash and crashed. In a way “Madam Satan” does to us what Madam Satan does to Bob: draws us in with the promise of something sexy only to deliver a bland wife and her stupid husband, reunited at last.

WARNING: SPOILERS

This was James Cagney’s first lead role after he became a star in “The Public Enemy”; and though gangsters like Tom Powers are what he’s known for, Bert Harris is actually more indicative of his early screen persona. In the precode era, Cagney was more grifter than gangster.

“Blonde Crazy” (née “Larceny Lane”), a tale told in four or five grifts, is not much of a movie but it’s fun. It feels like a B picture or exploitation flick in the way it’s steeped in the culture of the moment—as if it didn’t have the money to extract itself from the culture of the moment. You feel it mostly in the lingo. “You’re not a collar ad, but you're not bad looking.” “I could eat the hip off a horse.” “Aw, you’re as wet as he is.” And of course Bert’s term of endearment for any and all women: “Huuuuuhhh-ney!” 

But my favorite example is the use of dynamite as metaphor. It’s not a compliment yet:

“I’d stay away from those bellhops, they can’t do a girlie any good. And the worst monkey of them all is that guy Bert Harris. He’s dynamite. Everyone in this joint owes him money from those crooked dice of his.”

Dynamite as a pejorative makes way more sense, doesn’t it? Makes you wonder when it become a positive. And why. And what that says about us.

Scrapbooking
Bert Harris is both ass man and a bit of an ass. He’s a bellhop joyously checking out every passing blonde in the midst of myriad smalltown scams. We never see those crooked dice of his, but we do see the machinations involved in getting Anne Roberts (Joan Blondell) hired—sweet-talking, fast-talking and bribery—and then trying to get into her pants. For the latter, he winds up with his face slapped. That happens a lot. Consider the movie the revenge of Mae Clarke in the beating Cagney takes from women.

Bert may be dynamite but he’s still an amateur—he even keeps a scrapbook of newspaper clippings involving various grifts he’d like to try. When does he begin to think big? I guess when A. Rupert Johnson Jr. shows up (Guy Kibbee, in his first of five Cagney movies). He’s a hotel guest who also expects a little something-something from Anne, and harrumphs mightily when he doesn’t get it. So Bert shows him some Prohibition-era hootch, says it’s $10 a bottle, and when Rupert wonders if that isn’t a little steep, Bert intones slyly: “Not if the blonde chambermaid likes it.” Then with a pal (Nat Pendleton) playing cop, they catch Rupert canoodling in the back of his car with both Anne and the hootch. Desperate to avoid a scandal, our grifters are suddenly $5,000 richer.

All of this takes place, per an early title, in a “leading hotel of a small mid-western city.” The $5k bankrolls their move to a better hotel in a bigger city—Chicago. Except before Bert took the suckers; in Chicago, he’s the sucker. He and Anne fall in with two other grifters, Dapper Dan and Helen (Louis Calhern and Noel Francis), and they make a chump of him. While Helen flirts, Dan pretends he’s passing phony $20 bills—gets them from a guy at three-to-one—and Bert wants in. The $15k they get—real money, it turns out—winds up in a drawer in Bert’s hotel room—along with the previously earned $5k. Except they’ve already cut through the wall on the other side. So instead of cash, Bert is left holding a taunting note:

Darling:
paste this in your scrap book
love and kisses
Helen

Because he can’t bear to let Anne know he’s been taken, he grifts again—though later, Anne oddly sees the enterprise as beneath him. “Out-and-out thievery is not your style, Bert,” she says. “The worst thing you did was take from a lot of wise guys, cheat a lot of cheaters.” Which … sorta? Rupert was a lech, not a cheater. Plus the new grift isn’t bad. He finds out about a high society wedding, goes to a jeweler as a rep of the family, has an expensive necklace sent to the family home, then shows up as a rep of the jeweler saying, “Sorry, we sent this to the wrong house.” Now he’s got the expensive necklace, which he hocks. When the very Jewish pawn shop owner tries to chisel him down, we finally see a bit of Tom Powers. He grabs the guy by the back of the neck, calls him “Three Balls” (for the traditional pawn shop logo) and strongarms him into a better deal. “My, but you’re a tough guy,” the pawnshop owner says. “Not tough. Just mercenary,” Bert sneers before slapping the man with the dollar bills.

Now it’s onto New York, and guess who Anne runs into? “Einstein?” Bert jokes. Nope, Dapper Dan. That’s how she finds out Bert got grifted. Helen is already out of the picture so now it’s time to take Danny boy with another not-bad scam. Dan thinks Anne is working with him to grift the florid Col. Bellock (William Burgess), but it’s the opposite; she’s working with the Colonel. Late to the racetrack, Dan suggests some friendly wagers on races they’ve already missed, knowing one of their gang will call ahead to find out who won, then switch numbers on passing license plates to clue Dan. But the Colonel has the real winning numbers, and at the track Dan discovers he’s out $7500. He can’t figure what went wrong until he finds the taunting note Anne leaves behind.

The most fascinating thing about this revenge grift? It’s about 10 minutes of screentime and we don’t see Cagney. At all. It’s all Blondell. Can’t imagine a modern star taking such a backseat.

Now that that’s solved, what’s the drama/conflict? All along, Anne has complained that Bert just cared about money, blondes, and grifts.

• “Oh Bert, you’re such a boy. You’ll never grow up!”
• “Oh, Bert, sometimes you act like a kid.”

Now he wants to get married, he wants to travel to Europe, but Anne tells him he's too late: "I’m in love with someone else.” It’s the guy who helped her get the cinder out of her eye on the train, banker Joe Reynolds (played by a young and very good-looking Ray Milland). Bert watches their wedding from a nearby taxi cab, and when the cabbie asks if it’s a wedding or a funeral, Bert responds: “Both.” Nice line. Then he’s off to Europe by himself. When he returns a year later, he’s lost the spark.

What gets him moving again? Anne. She’s in trouble. OK, Joe’s in trouble. He embezzled $30k, invested it, lost it. Bert figures a cover: Since no one knows the funds are missing, have someone else—him—steal the rest, and they’ll figure it was all just part of the same robbery. Would’ve worked, too, except Joe is not just a cheat but a rat. He and the cops are waiting for Bert. That’s gotta be one of the worst ways to say “thank you” ever. Not to mention moronic. Imagine they’d actually caught Bert. He could’ve spilled the beans, and when Joe objected, he could’ve just said, “Check the satchel. There’s $30k missing in negotiable bonds. That’s on him.” At which point, Joe would’ve bolted like the rat he is. Instead, here, Bert lams it, there’s a car chase, he’s shot in the back, his car goes into a storefront. But he lives.

This is another way Bert Harris is more indicative of early Cagney than Tom Powers: He doesn’t die. We always think of Cagney getting plugged in the final reel, but in the 22 starring roles between “Public Enemy” and “Angels with Dirty Faces,” he only dies twice: “He Was Her Man” (1934) and “Ceiling Zero” (1936). Both deaths are sacrificial/heroic. Generally what happens to him is Hollywood 101: he beats the bad guys and gets the girl. He also has a tendency to repeat his catchphrase at the end, too: “Why, if I thought you meant that…” to Loretta Young; “I’ll put a gold spoon right in your kisser” to Mary Brian.

Here, too. He may be in prison, but Anne shows up, tells him about Joe’s perfidy, tells Bert she loves him and will wait for him. Once she leaves, overjoyed, he returns to the Bert we’ve always known. He tells the female prison guard:

If I had the wings of an angel, huuuuuu-ney
Over these prison walls I would fly! 

It’s not just a return to his catchphrase, it’s a tweak on “The Prisoner’s Song,” a 1920s staple that several years later the Dead End kids would sing at the end of “Dead End” in 1937. That song is probably why, in their next big role, they became angels with dirty faces—playing against Cagney, of course. The connections never stop.

You dirty rats
We all know the ’60s-era variety show Cagney imitation, “You dirty rat,” and we all know it’s a line he never said, but it didn’t come from nowhere. He probably came closest to saying it in “Taxi!,” when he says to the guy who killed his brother, “Come out and take it, you dirty yella-bellied rat, or I’ll give it to ya through the door!”

Here, too. When Anne tells him about Joe’s treachery, he says this:

Why, the dirty, double-crossing rat! I’d like to get my hooks on him I’d tear him to pieces!

Both movies were written by John Bright and Kubec Glasmon (née J.J. Glassman), Chicagoans who also wrote “The Public Enemy” and helped make Cagney’s career. They gave us the early Cagney lexicon, and were assigned to the budding star until Bright ran into trouble with Jack Warner, Darryl Zanuck, et al. and that was that. They were also different types: the Polish-born Glasmon tended toward respectability, the American-born Bright toward rebellion (he helped create the WGA). I don’t know if this is a lesson but the respectable Glasmon wound up dying of a heart attack at age 40 in 1938, while the rebellious Bright, who wound up in B pictures and then blacklisted, spent decades pickling himself and lived until 1989. His memoir, “Worms in the Winecup,” has nice nuggets but is indicative of a scattered mind. He kind of disses Glasmon, calling him “at best semiliterate,” but he adds that he had “a feel for character … his ear for speech patterns, particularly seamy street talk, was accurate and captured flavor.” One wonders if that’s where some of the flavor of this movie came from.

-- A shorter review of this film can be found here. It's from July 1999.