Irving Reis | The Big Street / 1942

stepping on him

by Douglas Messerli

 

Leonard Spigelgass (screenplay, based on a story by Damon Runyon), Irving Reis (director) The Big Street / 1942

 

Watching The Big Street again the other day, I was struck at just how close to camp this film was. Had Runyon gotten his desire to star Charles Laughton and Carole Lombard in the lead roles, the film would surely fallen off the cliff of ridiculousness; as it is it might have been the perfect target for a Charles Ludlum play. Perhaps it’s to be expected with a script, based on a story by fabulist Damon Runyon, by gay writer Leonard Spigelgass.

      Lucille Ball’s characterization of the mean-hearted and slightly course, money-grubbing nightclub singer, Gloria Lyons, is almost “over the top,” as she attacks her maid Ruby and a busboy, who in the first scene has saved her dog.  Soon after, she turns on her current boyfriend, the local mafia man, Case Ables (Barton MacLane), trading in his favors for the wealthier society cad, Decatur Reed (William T. Orr). His gruff reaction, hitting her in the face, sends her hurling down a staircase and into a hospital bed, paralyzed for the rest of her life..

      Fortunately for her, she has the secret admiration of Little Pinks (Henry Fonda), the busboy, who secretly sends flowers and, with Ruby’s help, sells Gloria’s jewels to pay her hospital bill. When they run out of trinkets, Pinks moves Gloria into his own tiny room. Forgot the absurdity of situation: in 1942, evidently, any sexual activity between the two in that snug little apartment was not even a question. It’s only because Fonda is so straight-forwardly serious and honest-Abe-faced that their current living arrangements doesn’t evoke giggles.

      What’s more, there are plenty of Hollywood character actors, including the wonderful Agnes Moorehead as the thin but endlessly-eating Violette Shumberg, Eugene Pallette as her unexpected boyfriend Nicely Nicely Johnson, a dynamic Ray Collins as Professor B, and Sam Levene as Horsethief, who distract our attention from Pinks’ moonstruck antics. These down-and-out figures, featured in many a Runyon tale, are seen here somewhat beyond their prime, mostly semi-retired from their former shady lives. They hardly have enough money to gamble. But they are legitimately humorous and, as always in Damon Runyonland, entirely loveable.

      When Gloria sends these men and women, Pinks’ loyal friends, packing, she might easily be compared to Dorothy’s Wicked Witch. Defiantly, Pinks still loves the ungrateful singer, to whom he subserviently plays Jeeves, even mimicking the role of butler he’ll be expected to become once she gets “well” and traps Decatur into marriage!

       Yet things get even stranger when she suggests that the poverty-stricken busboy wheel her from that big street of Broadway down to Miami where she can get warmed up and meet up with Decatur once again.

      Having totally lost his mind, and to prove it, we are shown Pinks behind her wheelchair trying to enter the Holland Tunnel. To settle the confusion of the toll taker and nearby police officer, a truck driver gives them a free ride to Washington, D.C., but the rest of voyage, apparently, is up to them! How the actors were able to shoot the scene without absolutely breaking into laughter perhaps demonstrates their thespian fortitude.

     Fortunately, the plot has arranged for Violette and Nicely Nicely to marry and move down to Miami to run a hot dog stand! Despite her dismissal of Pinks’ friends, at least Gloria now has a place to stay. Violette, having given up trying to make sense of Pinks’ love interest, even hands over enough money so that he can buy Gloria a little something in which she can lay out on the beach hoping to attract Decatur’s attentions.

    Swimming nearby, Decatur quickly spots Violette as the two strike up a conversation as if no time has passed; but when he soon after encounters Gloria in her wheel chair, it’s curtains for that affair as he literally turns and runs.

 

  Gloria blames his disappearance, of course, on Pinks. To call Gloria ungrateful would be like suggesting that Camille has a little cold. Runyon and Spiegelgass diagnose Gloria’s problem as “paranoia,” but their definition of that term is a bit odd: “It’s what happens to people when they get to believe they’re something they’re not.”

     Perhaps, but her “highness” has never been very kind unless the nearest man has an open checkbook; and now, in a fit of madness, she sends even Pinks away. But like the “worm” she’s described him as, he faithfully returns when told by Violette that Gloria is deathly ill.

      If it’s been difficult, so far, to give any credibility to this fantastic tale, we now have to stretch out imaginations even further. For, although Pinks has found a job—in a casino, moreover, owned by Gloria’s former mafia friend—and for some inexplicable reason, nearly all of Pinks’ gambling friends have descended upon the “Magic City,” Gloria hasn’t come to realize how much she owes to them. True to form, Gloria has another delusional vision: she’s in a large hall with all of Miami society, dancing at a special event dedicated to—who else?—herself.

       To make it all come true, the formerly honest Pinks turns to robbery, stealing a gown and—after overhearing an attempted con-game involving the same woman’s jewels—pockets several diamond necklaces, before demanding the couple hand over rubies from another heist. With the evidence of the rubies in hand, he approaches mobster Ables, behind the swindle, with a deal he cannot refuse: throw a big party for Gloria or he’ll go straight to the police!

      Once again Pinks’ old friends attempt to throw a shindig for the unappreciative Gloria. Ozzie Nelson and his band accompany the songstress in yet another version of her famed “Who Knows,” and Pinks sweeps her up into a waltz by allowing her, quite literally, to walk all over him, her feet planted firmly on the top of his! One last wish—she wants to see the ocean—is granted by the incredibly naïve and deluded Pinks, who picks up his now dead lover and takes up a grand staircase for a midnight look at the sea.

       Pinks (born Augustus Pinkerton II), treats Gloria so much like any queer boy might treat a gay icon such as Judy Garland or Barbra Streisand that we gradually begin the perceive why people might have come to call him “Little Pinks,” the color at least since the latter part of the 19th century that has been associated with male femininity and queer sissies, something the Nazi’s recalled in assigning the upside-down pink triangle to homosexuals.

       In the original story, Pinks is utterly aware the he could never romantically satisfy Gloria, and his servitude and plan to push her wheelchair from New York City to Miami brings at least one of his friends to suggest he needs to be locked up in the mental ward of Bellevue Hospital, famous for its psychiatric facilities. Pinks romances his Gloria in pure adolescent adulation, the kind of love gay boys have for the untouchable female goddesses whose songs seem to be crying out for the same lost love and sociable acceptance that they themselves desperately seek.   

    I can see it now: Carole Lombard hanging on to the hulky mass of Laughton, known to have been mostly attracted to young boys! That surely would surely have brought down the house! They just no longer write scripts like this one!

 

Los Angeles, January 26, 2013

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2013).