Roy Del Ruth | Winner Take All / 1932

boxing himself in

by Douglas Messerli

 

Wilson Mizner and Robert Lord (screenwriters, based on a story by Gerald Beaumont), Roy Del Ruth (director) Winner Take All / 1932

 

Roy Del Ruth’s 1932 melodrama Winner Take All is another film with James Cagney as a tough. This time around he’s a boxer, Jimmy Kane, who’s simply not intellectually able to move in the circles he’s desirous of, that of rich blonde women who live on Park Avenue. They dangle him like a different kind of toy lusting after his coarse demeanor and features, nose and ears, that the boxing ring has redesigned for his face. And he’s dumb enough to think that an occasional kiss, and invite in for drink means true love.

       The film begins well enough with the punch-crazy kid being sent off to a kind of desert health ranch to get some rest—he apparently doesn’t know what a bedroom looks like, which becomes a kind of unstated motif since he can never seem to find his way into his later girlfriend’s bedroom either—and rid his system, as his manager Pop Slavin (Guy Kibbee) of hopes, booze, and dames, particularly the latter.

       But the moment the coyotes begin to howl, he meets another girl, this one a former singer at a New York night club he regularly visited, a singer named Peggy Harmon (Marian Nixon) whose son Dickie (the always charming Dickie Moore) needs the warm southwest sun and air to nurse him back to health.

       For a few frames it seems that the dumb ego-driven womanizer has finally found someone to bring out the nicer person in him, and he finds himself so taken by the woman and her boy that when they discover their insurance policy has lapsed, he jumps over to the Mexican border to Tijuana for a quick bout of “winner take all,” squeaking through a boxing match that nets him enough to pay for another couple more months at the ranch for Dickie and a flurry of attention-getting lines in the press for himself. 

   Supposedly “healed,” he runs off to New York to take on a few potential champion boxers in Madison Square Garden, Peggy knowing better than we that he is sure to fall back into his old ways. Of course, he can’t resist the blondes, even if he has learned to replace the booze with milk; and when Joan Gibson (Virginia Bruce) shows up with her date Roger Elliott (John Roche) to Kane’s after-bout locker room, it only takes Gibson’s finger put to his sweaty chest—pulled back with little disgust before in a jesting lust she asks for his boxing glove—to send the boxer himself into a spin from which he recovers only in the very last moment of the movie.

       The more time he spends with Gibson and her friends the more obnoxious Kane becomes, compensating for their oh-so polite-jibes and topical chatters with an exaggeration of his own coarse manners. At one point when the friends attempt to discuss the matter of Russia’s five year plan he’s asked for his opinion, responding that five years is too long with “dos installment thieves; I pay cash for everything.” The butler can’t resist giggling over the comment delightfully like a little girl, and Kane can’t resist slugging him out.

      From here on we recognize that the boxer has become such a bore that we can only hope for a few more pansies to bring in a few laughs and a little fun into the film.

       Gibson’s friend Roger has already appeared a little too suave and well-spoken, his sibilants slipped by his tongue too close to his teeth for us not suspect his sexual inclinations; and the first time he introduces himself to Kane, the boxer answers “That’s a pretty name.”

      And when the vain Kane is told by Gibson that he’d be a handsome man without his broken nose and his cauliflower years, he takes off for a month to get a plastic surgery along with ordering up a series of etiquette lessons in which Forbes (Alan Mowbray) is only too happy to take him by the arm and walk down an imaginary 5th Avenue to introduce him as his lady friend to the gentlemen and duchesses he meets along their path.

      Soon after—having decided, over the resisting body of his blonde admirer who by this time has grown disgusted by her temporary trophy, that they’re going to get married after he wins the championship match and switch, as she puts, “from a canvas floor to a mahogany desk”—he gets fitted for a wedding suit, the tailors behaving similarly to those who fitted Cagney in The Public Enemy the year before, only this time even more flamboyantly as Mr. Higbee and Mr. Pettigrew put their hands to work in determination of the size and fullness of Mr. Kane’s bodily dimensions, Pettigrew (John T. Murray) rubbing his hand from his model’s back down to his buttocks to declare that the “tail’s about right.” 

       At least, after the scene we’ve just witnessed where Kane has told the forgotten Peggy that he’s leaving her and Dickie behind to marry the woman everyone but he knows is no good, we get a chuckle or two. By this time, we almost hate the boxer as much as the crowds at Madison Square who boo the dancing contender terrified to lean into the punch for fear of the losing the perfect structure of his new nose.

      And even his bullying no longer works, as Gibson runs off for an ocean voyage with her effeminate admirer Roger, and Kane, now having a deadline to knock out the champion so that he can escape the ring in order to bring his lover back, demonstrates that he really can slug it out.

      He wins the match but loses his game as he finally catches on about Gibson’s lack of interest in strong, sweaty men. Finding Roger across the hall from the blonde’s shipboard cabin, he lays them both out, returning to the loyal and patient Peggy who incredibly is still waiting in her hotel room. What she sees in him after what we’ve observed for an hour lies outside our imaginations. If this film hadn’t been populated with swishy beaus, butlers, teachers, and tailors we all might have booed the dumb ox and taken off to Tijuana ourselves to see some real body and soul.

        What we realize finally is that even if they serve only an ancillary figure of mockery, the pretty boyfriend, giggling butler, parading etiquette teacher, and the two touchy-feely tailors have far more fun in their lives than the boxer who has boxed himself in by trying to slug his way to the top.

 

Los Angeles, February 6, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2022).