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).
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