Roy Del Ruth | Lady Killer / 1933

the shapeshifter

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ben Markson and Lillie Hayward (screenplay based on a story by Rosalind Keating Shaffer), Roy Del Ruth (director) Lady Killer / 1933

 

Once the 1933 film Lady Killer introduces us to the movie theater usher Dan Quigley (James Cagney)—a young who refuses to stop chewing gum and games with dice in the men’s room during the run of the movie—is inevitably fired from his job, director Roy Del Ruth treats the script by Ben Markson and Lillie Hayward like an out-of-control locomotive racing down the tract and jumping off onto other lines with unpredictable results.

     Within only a few frames, the movie picks up Dan in a hotel in which an obviously flirtatious woman, Myra Gale (Mae Clarke), who accidentally drops her purse without noticing, allowing the film’s hero to run after and tracking her down. Myra introduces him to a secret card game into which Dan is quickly gets hooked where he loses. Minutes later he observes another stooge showing up at Myra’s door with a similar purse and Dan suddenly gets wise, before you can even blink an eye horning in on the crooked gambling group and making them a fortune by establishing a gambling casino for the rich and famous.

     The same customers, as we observe in one incident involving our underhanded hero, are fated to find themselves in accidents just outside their mansions, the victim (Dan) and a doctor just arrived on the scene (one of his gang members) suggesting he be permitted into the house until he can be transferred to a hospital. Within minutes Dan relays the layout of the house and the location of the family safe; and within hours his henchman have robbed it.

      But if you think this film is a crime story you’d be terribly mistaken since once the gang attracts the attention of the police and they break up and move on, Dan and Myra travel on that same locomotive to Chicago and finally Los Angeles, where now alone and with money, fate takes Dan in hand and places him as a extra on a movie set where he meets the beautiful star Lois Underwood (Margaret Lindsay) who, unlike Lina Lamont in relation to Don Lockwood in Singing in the Rain, is totally approachable and friendly to the stunt performer. And before you know it, with the help of hundreds of fan letters written by himself, Dan has become a popular movie star dating Lois.

      And for a short while Lady Killer forgets it’s even a movie about making it big in Hollywood, Lois hosting a big party for her birthday that Dan arranges to be crashed—in the style of the soon-to-be-popular screwball comedy—by a crate of wild monkeys, a band of yodelers, and a full-grown elephant, suggesting that he’ll do anything for love.

      Given the trouble he’s already gotten into in the first two-thirds of the movie, we’re hardly surprised when he takes Lois on a tour of his new apartment, he and she discover Myra in his bed.

     Somehow she and the old gang have jumped the tracks to meet up in Hollywood with their former partner, now, as they naturally see it, the perfect set-up for introducing them into the homes of the Hollywood rich and famous.

    But this time Dan’s gone straight for good, so he claims. Besides he now has to use all of his remaining cinematic energy in wooing Lois back after his faux pas of leaving a left-over dame in his bed. But as in dozens of movies after and some even before, the sins of the past come haunting the good deeds of the present. The gang, using the reliable Hollywood tour guides to introduce them to the best of the Beverly Hills bungalows, begin to rob the stars. But when Lois becomes a victim it’s too much for Dan, and he tracks down his old group, gun in hand, stealing back the jewels they’ve taken with the intention of returning them to the proper owner.

      Unfortunately, the police, who have been tracking the gang, are waiting outside the door, and given his previous ties with the same desperados and with the jewels nestling in his coat pocket, he’s arrested despite, for once, his total innocence.

     Despite her anger, Lois is still determined to bail him out; but when she arrives she discovers that some other friends have been there before her to get him out—the gang obviously, who now intend to kill him before he squeals about them.

     Wily Danny boy, however, arranges for the cop to trail him to the real perpetrators the crime, and after a wild and wooly chase scene complete with tommie-gun fight out between the criminals and the cops, Dan and Myra end up safely ensconced in a gully, while the police kill all the others but one, who shall now certainly have to tell the truth in order to save himself from the electric chair.

     Dan and Lois fly off to Mexico to get married, Myra gets a more lenient sentencing, and the audience goes home humming instead of looking over their shoulders in fear for their lives.

     And along the way they’ve been mightily entertained in a manner than must have sent shivers down Joseph Breen’s spineless back. Certainly, along with all the other such movies made in 1933, by the end the year he and his friends were so terrified by certain kinds of sex and violence that they were prepared to ban nearly any talk about sex and curtail violence unless it meant killing of any species that didn’t salute the US flag and go to Christian churches every Sunday.

     Cagney certainly seemed like he was enjoying the nice tough guy we was playing, at one point exuberantly pulling Myra by her hair out his bed and putting his foot to her butt in a kick out the door. At another point, when a film critic gives Lois a bad review based on personal matters, he pulls the stuffed-shirt away from his dining bimbo and delivers up in the bathroom where he forces the protesting gentlemen to literally eat his words in the form the newspaper clipping before throwing into a bathroom stall where impact of his body causes the toilet to flush—a sound echoing in our ears that will never again be heard in the movies or TV for several decades. 

       The Los Angeles police chief, having been sent word from back East of Dan’s being under suspicion, insists they arrest him for being a vag, presumably the cop lingo for vagrant, which when the word is spoken, in the instance, turns the lower mouthed vowel into a higher mouthed fricative.

       Meeting up with his godforsaken gang members, Dan brings them a basket of fruit, ready to hand out a grapefruit to Myra before thinking better of it (reminding the actor Cagney, obviously, of what how he previously applied that fruit to the same actresses’ face in 1931’s The Public Enemy) before delivering up the rest of the basket to one of his other old friends with the words, “I know you like fruit.”

      Dressed in the costume of satin high pantaloons for his role as an Italian count, Dan is confronted by a detective, the two of them engaging in an almost violent verbal interchange before, as he turns to leave, the cop stops, taps him on the shoulder, and says, “You mind if I tell you how sweet you look?”

      Violence against women and homosexual innuendos seem to come with the territory in Cagney’s films of the early 1930s.

       It’s too bad, however, that the writers and directors weren’t also able to link or at least portray on parallel tracts Dan’s voyages through the criminal world and those of Hollywood. In its satire of Hollywood filmmaking, it hints at how the industry robs the working and middle classes just as surely as the criminals steal from the rich. But its speed through the film’s 76 minutes, the filmmakers can’t seem to get up any true moral indignation for either profession, perhaps in part because Cagney infuses them both so much energy and charm. But if they might have bothered to truly interweave this strains of their shape-shifting genres, Lady Killer could have risen from a charming B-grade movie to become a true classic. As it is, it’s just about good enough to have become another real thorn in the already itchy asses of the Hays censorship committee.

 

Los Angeles, November 15, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2022).