Mervyn LeRoy | Big City Blues / 1932

on the town

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lillie Hayward (screenplay based on the stage play New York Town by Ward Morehouse), Mervyn LeRoy (director) Big City Blues / 1932

 

In 1932 alone director Mervyn LeRoy directed 5 films, High Pressure, Heart of New York, Two Seconds, Blue City Blues, Three on a Match, and I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, the last two of what we can still describe as early film classics. So it should be of no great embarrassment to admit Big City Blues, with it’s short 63 minute running time, and a plot as thin as a couple of tourist postcards, is not considered among LeRoy’s most memorable work.

   That said, this movie is a quite lively, despite its fully stereotypical view of a young innocent man, in this case the likeable Bud Reeves (Eric Linden) from a small town in Indiana, who arrives like thousands of men and women from the Midwest and elsewhere as celebrated in Stephen Sondheim's song "Another Hundred People," all enchanted with New York City only to discover it’s filled with crooks and dangers beyond their imagination. Bud Reeves is so beautifully and intensely naïve that you have to wonder if he hasn’t spent his whole life back home hiding in some closet, but, no, he’s not gay, just a green as they get and, not so incidentally, his pockets filled with a small inheritance of $1,100 (about $26,000 today).

    Indeed, this film begins as a pure comedy with even the Willow Creek, Indiana Station Master, to whom Bud hands over his beloved dog, and who bets another friend that the eager boy will be back from Manhattan with a month.  

    Critic J. B. Kaufman intelligently summarizes the situation:

“Linden’s character, naive innocent though he is, believes he has prepared well for his transition to the big city: he has a well-connected cousin in New York who can guide and protect him. The cousin turns out to be Walter Catlett, one of the most colorful character players in Hollywood, cast here as a fast-talking opportunist who welcomes his young relative with open arms and dubious motives. It is soon revealed that Catlett is far less interested in Linden’s well-being than in his inheritance. Within minutes, Linden is swept into Catlett’s circle of friends, his savings diverted to the purchase of copious amounts of bootleg liquor. The day’s activities culminate in a party, the party turns dangerous, the cousin conveniently disappears, and soon Linden is on the run from the police. The one bright spot in his day is his introduction to a chorus girl, with whom he is instantly smitten. The chorine is played by Joan Blondell, who had come into her own at Warner Bros. by 1932. Easily the best-known star in this film, she gets top billing and delivers a sympathetic, nuanced performance.”

     Most of the early part of this film, after Bud wanders through a montage of New York City images a bit like the sailors arriving in port in On the Town, is spent with him getting engagingly rooked out of his money by his Ed Wynn-like cousin "Gibby" Gibboney (Catlett), who may not be gay but is nonetheless such a giddy eccentric that one cannot truly imagine him in bed with a woman, and who seems more interested in drinking and partying than anything to do with romance. Gibby spends his life as a grand pretender, citing his connections with practically everyone in the city and playing a giggly and almost girlish dandy by surrounding himself with second-rate chorines.

     Yet it all seems comic fun, as, after discovering that his young innocent cousin Bud has checked into a decent suite at the Hotel Hercules, he determines to throw a slightly raucous party. Besides, one of the chorines, Vida Fleet (Blondell), as Kaufman suggests, is as immediately attracted to Bud as he is to her. And the others, well if nothing else they make for interesting types, one woman, carrying around everywhere with her—pretending to read as she hears “Stacky” Stackhouse (Ned Sparks) recite the places to which he’s traveled—the infamous lesbian novel of 1928, Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness.

       Almost at the very same moment that we see her diving behind her lesbian book covers, another local gangster who has been invited to the party, Shep Adkins (played in an early film appearance by Humphrey Bogart), cynically comments on how New York is changing, the police having just arrested a man with two knives in one pocket and “a power puff and a lipstick” in the other, suggesting either a transgender individual or simply a gay man with murder on his mind, reminding us somewhat of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1930 film Murder!

    In short, gender is very much an issue in this macho New York environs where one moment the whole gang is ordering up sandwiches and the next they are rushing down to another room for champagne and better eats, leaving Bud and Vida in the room alone to get better acquainted.

    But soon they are back with champagne bottles ready to party anew, even if by this time a couple of the chorines have passed out drunk. A hotel dick Hummel (the comic Guy Kibbee) tries to squelch their fun, until Gibby offers him up some wine.

     And the comic fun continues until it no longer seems fun, Shep daring to put his paws on a chlorine, to whom another thug, “Lenny” Sully (Lyle Talbot) lays claim. A fight breaks out, lights are turned off, and as the bottles are hurled at one another, one of passed-out nightclub dancers, Jackie DeVoe (Josephine Dunn) being hit in the head; by the time the lights are switched back on, she lies dead.

     Like so many rats, Gibby and his friends, male and female, immediately go scurrying off in fear, leaving the poor innocent rube Budd in his own room with a dead girl on his couch. The arrival of the half-drunken house detective for another refill, reveals the dead girl.

    By this time even Bud has escaped, Vida having returned with at least a tiny bit of conscience, but now also having to go on the run. What was a comedy has now transformed into tragedy.

    Both Budd and Vida are now suspected criminals, Budd not even being able to leave and run for home. Somehow he makes his way to an underground theater bar where the conversation runs heavy about the gossip of stage actors, and there he meets up with a wealthy older woman, Serena Cartlich (Jobyna Howland) who herself throws daily parties, and is only too delighted for such a handsome young man to show up, sit down next to her, talk, and even offers to buy her a drink.

     She suggests they go somewhere else more celebratory, and we wonders if they might not go to Club55 where he has heard that Vida sometimes can be found. Recognizing that he has already found another woman lived, Serena, however, is only too happy to accompany him to the Club55, where amazingly he does run into Vida, who immediately apologizes for having left him in the lurch, both commiserating about their condition.

      Deciding to quite literally abandon all hope, but have fun in the process, they move upstairs to the gambling casino where they both lose all their money on the toss of the dice. Moreover, they are arrested and taken to police headquarters where an insensitive Chief of Police (Wallis Clark) interrogates them without believing a word about their claims of innocence regarding the death of Jackie.

     Eventually, the police round up all the other partyers but one, waiting it out until one of them admits the crime. At a sad moment of Bud’s despair, Bogart’s character turns to the Indiana boy and meanly turns to him, “Now how do you like New York?”

      Once more seeking liquid refreshment in the linen room where the Hercules Hotel house detective hides his flasks, Hummel returns to the room where he discovers, in a nearby closet, the body of Lenny Sully hanging from a coat rack, the other half of the bottle that killed Jackie at his feet. Apparently, he has killed himself in despair over the girl’s death.

     The police, all too hurriedly for the sake of belief, quickly release the others, and somehow Bud finds money enough to take him back in Indiana, his dog, and home, while still determined to work hard enough to save up money in a year or so to return to New York City and Vida.

     Whether or not he’ll be able to raise the money or Vida will still be waiting for him, is almost beside the point. Our young dunce is still enchanted by the big city and is only to ready to face its lights again, perhaps to even show up at one of Serena Cartlich’s evening soirées.

     Like so very many of the so-called “pre-code” films of 1930s, while telling basically a heterosexual love story, the movie is filled with references to sexual and gender queerness. This was LeRoy’s third such movie just in 1932.

 

Los Angeles, April 25, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (April 2026).