Lloyd Bacon | A Slight Case of Murder / 1938

going straight

by Douglas Messerli

 

Earl Baldwin and Joseph Schrank (screenplay, based on the play by Damon Runyon and Howard Lindsay), Lloyd Bacon (director) A Slight Case of Murder / 1938

 

Lloyd Bacon’s 1938 murder comedy begins where Damon Runyon’s A Pocketful of Miracles ends, with the central character—bootlegger Remy Marco (played with wonderful swagger by Edward G. Robinson)—going straight. His former mobster cronies are told to get shaves, to dress less loudly, and somehow alter their famed Runyon accents in order to become salesmen for Marco’s brewery which, suddenly with the end of prohibition, is legal! At home, Marco’s wife Mary (Jane Bryan), when told of his business plans, quickly attempts to speak like a society dame (for a moment successfully channeling Margaret Dumont) and nixes the various crap games going on in the living room during a raucous party. Their slot machine room now is described as a music room! In short, their world is about to change!

      Fortunately for us, no one is very successful in his or her intended transformations, the accents they imitate slipping back into the street jargon, with Marco’s formerly illegal occupation—which once made him rich—now going bust. For Marco, a teetotaler, has never tasted his ghastly Velvet brew. Bankers are about to call in their loan in order to take over the brewery with the knowledge that it’s not the facilities that are at fault, but the product. As if that weren’t enough, Marco, who has been forced by finances to call home his expensively educated daughter, is determined to return to their rented summer house in Saratoga with a young orphan—the worst behaved boy in his alma mater, an orphanage headed by the eagle-eyed Margaret Hamilton—in tow.

       Meanwhile, unknown to them, their home has been intruded upon by five hoodlum acquaintances who have just robbed a bank roll of millions belonging to gambling bookies. Four of them are shot dead by their fifth nervous partner just as the Marcos and their retinue arrive, followed by a state trooper, Dick Whitewood (Willard Parker)—son of a wealthy Saratoga scion—who, unbeknownst to Marco, intends to marry his daughter Nora (Ruth Donnelly). Despite this comic works’ title, there is obviously nothing slight about Marco and his family’s dilemmas.

      This mulligan stew has so many loose threads, in fact, that it seems from the outset that they can never all be tied up, and Runyon’s tale can end in any number of various ways, as the discovered bodies are shipped out to various locations and gathered up again with the news of a “dead or alive” award; the murderer slinks through the house to reclaim the satchel of stolen money; the bad-boy, slightly drunken orphan uncovers the satchel hidden beneath his bed; and the trooper’s wealthy, frail father visits the roaring party that seems to be more of a reunion of lunatics than a civilized celebration.

     Nonetheless, the pieces all fall into the right places, as Marco pays off his debts (or, at least gets another loan), discovers how godly awful his beer is, and helps his future son-in-law to become hero by shooting the four-already dead bodies and, quite by accident, winging the fifth man on the run!

    At film’s close, I am sure there are still some loose ends (what happens to the orphan? how is old man Whitewood reunited with the Marco family?), but it doesn’t really matter! So much as happened in this funny farce, we have no time to cavil. And Marco, presumably, having changed the recipe of his beer, will finally be able to go straight and earn a living both!

      Employing dozens of Hollywood’s best character actors, Bacon’s spritely adaptation of Runyonland is a hit!   

 

Los Angeles, February 4, 2013

Reprinted in World Cinema Review (February 2013).

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).

Harmon Jones | Bloodhounds of Broadway / 1952

southern fried chicken

by Douglas Messerli

 

Sy Gomberg (screenplay, adapted from stories Damon Runyon by Albert Mannheimer), Harmon Jones (director) Bloodhounds of Broadway / 1952

 

In this 1952 mishmash of several Damon Runyon stories woven together in order to create a showcase for Mitzi Gaynor, the magic of Runyonland seems to have almost completely died out, the film beginning with a dirge-like torch song, sung by a somewhat dour Yvonne Dugan (Marguerite Chapman) to an empty chair. The famed Dave the Dude’s Club seems more like a morgue than a popular night spot. Indeed, gambling, so it appears, is about to come to an end! In the backroom Robert “Numbers” Foster (Scott Brady) has called together his associates to explain the situation: they are all about to be called to testify before a Senate committee and plan to quickly forsake their beloved New York for the environs of Miami before disembarking for Cuba! Numbers’ girlfriend, Yvonne, will testify in their stead, carefully trained by a script held by Curtaintime Charlie (dancer-singer Richard Allen).

       Accordingly, this empty fable begins with a boring and unrevealing “trial,” one of the mobsters repeating “I can’t remember,” while Yvonne, true to her man, perfumes the room with lies. Even the senators throw up their hands in boredom: the inquiry ends as quickly as it has begun!

         Meanwhile, down South, since things have seemingly calmed down, Numbers hires a car piloted by the only truly funny figure in his work, Harry “Poorly” Sammis (Wally Vernon), to drive slowly back to the Big City. But Poorly’s poor driving skills sends them into the backwoods of Georgia, where they immediately encounter a gingham-clad Emily Ann Stackerlee (Mitzi) barnstorming over her granddaddy’s grave in a rousing chorus of funereal songs. As quick as you can say, “howdy, miss,” she invites the interlopers home for dinner, dancing up servings of candied yams and grits! Dinner, unfortunately, is interrupted by the gun-toting neighbor boys, Crockett Pace and his brothers, ending with Numbers, Poorly, and Emily Ann, along with her beloved bloodhounds, speeding off into the sunset!

 

      If you think these events might be lacking some credibility, hold on! For Numbers, having been “calmed down” by Emily Lee’s singing, suddenly gets the urge to take her along to New York where he might “mentor” and see to her education, hankering, evidently, to play “Daddy Long Legs” to this innocent country gal. But wouldn’t you know, the minute they get the Big Apple, where Emily Lee is given up into the tutelage of show-girl Tessie Sammis (Mitzi Green), the green country kid suddenly becomes a 20-something woman who, it turns out, can sing and dance as good as any Broadway star. As they play out a kind of “I can do anything better routine,” Tessie, Curtaintime, and Emily Lee irresistibly patter “I Have a Feeling You’re Fooling.”

      The rest of this silly pastiche is made up of cutsey routines for Mitzi—some of them quite entertaining—trouble-making explosions by the jealous Yvonne, and the confused reactions of Numbers, who, losing his idiot savant ability to multiply and add all combinations of figures, has fallen desperately in love without his knowing it. Stitching these threads together are scenes in which the dogs, now hooked on Poorly’s pills, roam the streets of Broadway and, more often fall into deep sleep; Tessie’s cheerleading support of her protégée; and Emily Lee’s never-ending attempts to feed everyone she meets. A second investigation into the gambling racket sends Numbers into hiding once again, as his former reform-school friend, Inspector McNamara (Michael O’Shea) attempts to convince Emily Lee to save her lover from years in prison by making a deal: one year in prison for going straight!

      Screenplay writer Sy Gomberg and adapter Albert Mannheimer don’t give Runyon’s suckers an even chance. The Southern fried chicken, oily as it is, is served up cold. Numbers, upon his release from the slammer, and Emily Lee grow fat as an old married couple, hoofing their lives away. Issinit sweet?

          

Los Angeles, February 9, 2013

Reprinted in World Cinema Review (February 2013).

Joseph L. Mankiewicz | Guys and Dolls / 1955

cider in the ear

by Douglas Messerli

Joseph L. Mankiewicz and Ben Hecht (screenplay, based on the musical by Jo Swerling, Abe Burrows, and Frank Loesser from stories by Damon Runyon), Joseph L. Mankiewicz (director) Guys and Dolls / 1955

 

As anyone who has read my reviews in World Cinema Review or my pieces on my US Theater, Opera, and Performance blog will have perceived, I am very fond of American musical theater and even consider myself an authority of sorts on the American musical genre. My favorite film musical, as I have written elsewhere, is West Side Story, but my favorite stage musical, hands up, is Guys and Dolls (wonderful works such as Finian’s Rainbow, Oklahoma!, and The Music Man closely follow).

     I have seen several stage productions of the great Frank Loesser including the 1976 all black production in Washington, D.C. and the enjoyable Jerry Zaks Broadway revival of 1992, as well as having seen, in concert, Barbara Cook’s incredible rendition of the lead song—with all its lyrics! It is hard to imagine a better reincarnation of the character Miss Adelaide than Faith Prince in the 1992 production. But I still prefer Vivian Blaine’s less-winkingly performed straight-forward satire in the film musical.

 

      Despite its rather oddball casting, in fact, the film version still stands up to all other renditions (I did not see the original 1950 Broadway performance) I have experienced, in part because of Mankiewicz’s brilliant pairing of musical legends such as Frank Sinatra, Vivian Blaine, and Stubby Kaye with dramatic actors, Marlon Brando and Jean Simmons, who amazingly, he allows to actually sing in their own voices! Certainly there are songs I miss in the film—“A Bushel and a Peck,” “I’ve Never Been in Love Before,” “More I Cannot Wish You” and “Marry the Man Today”—but “Pet Me Proper” as the early strip number almost works almost as well. And nothing can match the high-voiced intensity of Brando’s warbling. He (as Sky Masterson) and Simmons (as Sergeant Sarah Brown)—her voice expressing itself in a kind of wavering soprano—manage to sell the lead rolls far better than the spirited stage revivals, while offering a kind of honesty film musicals seldom proffer.

     Mankiewicz clearly saw the possibilities of Brando’s and Simmons’ intense acting styles coming through their inexperienced voice boxes. Simmons actually comes alive as a musician in “If I Were a Bell.” Brando is so disarmingly charming that if you didn’t fall in love with his natural good looks, you might want to take him home just for the high-piping incantations of “Luck Be a Lady” and the repeated whiningly melodious “Your Eyes Are the Eyes of a Woman in Love.”

      Sinatra (Nathan Detroit), as always sings marvelously—although Loesser, himself, thought his crooning not right for the role—but his acting is here represented by a kind of grumpy bemusement: he’s in the doghouse for most of the movie for failures to revive his “floating” crap games, nail-bitingly deep in trouble not only with the police and his fellow gamblers but with his long-lasting, sneezing and discontent life-long lover, Adelaide. At one point he bemoans: “Everybody in the whole world who hates me is now here.” 

     Back to Vivien Blaine, whose “Adelaide’s Lament” is perhaps one of the best musical numbers ever performed on stage and film. I’ve watched the film performance of that song hundreds of times and it has never lost one instant of its absolute wonderment:

 

So much virus inside
That her microscope slide
Looks like a day at the zoo
Just from wanting her memories in writing
And a story her folks can be told
A person can develop a cold.

 

   Brando’s acting, strangely enough, has little of the charm of his singing as his character, a life-long misanthrope (“Figuring weight for age, all dolls are the same.”), seems to be playing out his bet to take the “doll to Cuba” with a kind of detached amusement all his own. Simmons, a kind of pre-feminist, failing evangelist, accordingly, gets the best lines, exploding into fits of perpetual frustration over the fact that the man for whom she has fallen fits none of her proper preconceptions. She has even analyzed herself as a frustrated maiden attracted to sin. But this is, after all, Damon Runyonland, and despite all the seeming impediments, things miraculously work out—Sky suddenly discovering himself, as his father warned him, “with cider in his ear,” falling in love with the Mission Doll Sarah, while Adelaide, after decades of waiting, finally gets to marry her delinquent gambler lover. How they’ll ever settle with her mother over the family she has already claimed to have had is never explained.

     In between there is enough good dancing, singing, and, in the final act—just in case you’re losing interest—a rabble-rousing mission sing-out wherein Stubby Kaye (as Nicely-Nicely) joyously converts before the eyes of his fellow gamblers—to jam up the streets of any urban center, let alone the few blocks of Manhattan’s Broadway which the double marriage closes down.

      Never has the Runyon style and upbeat vision of confirmed sinners—that is every man and woman who falls in love—been better realized in this wedding of the hot (Simmons) and the cool (Brando), or is it the hot (Brando) and the school-marmish cool (Simmons)? One can only ask, after the screen goes black, who was the sinner and who the saved? After all, Sky Masterson knows the Bible even better than his Salvation Army doll!

                   

Los Angeles, August 11, 2012

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2012).

Sydney Pollack | Three Days of the Condor / 1975

the reader

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lorenzo Semple, Jr. and David Rayfiel (screenplay, based on a novel by James Grady), Sydney Pollack (director) Three Days of the Condor / 1975

 

For many years now I have thoroughly enjoyed the mystery-thriller-spy movie Three Days of the Condor, watching it annually since its premiere in 1975. This is not a great work of cinema, but despite Jean Baudrillard grouping it with films that he describes as “retro cinema,” films that are “remakes” of what he describes as historically “real” cinema, I enjoy its slick maneuvers as the handsome hero, Joe Turner (played by Robert Redford in his prime) attempts to discover who has murdered all his co-workers in a small New York office, a branch of the CIA that looks for “clues” by reading books. I have a penchant, I must admit, for films that find evil-doing in organizations of authority, and I enjoy watching works wherein these often maniacal men and women of power are undone. And how could I—a full time reader, of films, fiction, and poetry—not like a film which features a man who is employed as a reader.

      As often happens with films I have watched many times, I saw the film somewhat differently this time around. It began with my wondering what I might have done if I snuck out to lunch only to find, when I returned, that six of my co-workers had been brutally shot to death. Even that first question, however, posed further dilemmas. I realized that, although we are meant throughout to sympathize with the “hero,” I personally would never have joined up with an organization such as the CIA in the first place. Turner, when queried by his superior, Dr. Lappe (Don McHenry) about his ability to fit into the organization, responds with extreme naiveté, suggesting he would like to be able to tell close friends what he does at his job. It is almost as if Turner had never considered the implications of signing up with the government agency. And when he calls the FBI to report the murders, he can hardly even recall his code name. Told not to go home, he does precisely that, almost being caught in the trap which would surely have meant his death. While movies such as Three Days of the Condor, as well as the Watergate affair and numerous news articles, have taught me to be highly suspicious of anything a CIA agent might tell me, Turner believes he can be “brought in” to safety by meeting up with an old friend in all alley. It is, of course, a trap, and his friend is killed as he attempts to save Turner from the shooter.

     His next step is one that should have long ago made clear that Joe Turner and I have little in common, even though the movie tries to maintain the myth that Turner is a kind of befuddled everyman: he kidnaps, at random, a beautiful woman, Kathy Hale (Faye Dunaway), who just happens to be a photographer, living alone in a nice, if small, apartment, who, instead of screaming, allows herself to be carried off.  She is just slightly sexually kinky enough to not wildly protest, later, his tying her up.  Although she finds his story a bit unbelievable (who could believe a line that begins: “Listen, I work for the CIA. I am not a spy. I just read books”?), she helps him ward off a would-be murderer, and, ultimately, joins in a caper that includes a series of tricky meetings with the local CIA head, J. Higgins (Cliff Robertson) while Turner himself finds his way into a telephone terminal where he cleverly splices together several lines so that when he again calls the CIA he cannot be traced. Meeting with his murdered friends’ wife, he encounters the man behind the murders, Joubert (Max von Sydow) and escapes by paying several children to surround him (he pretends to have locked himself out) on his way back to the car.

  

    Yet this clearly clever man does not, until very late in the work, pick up the obvious links to his question asked at the beginning of the film in response to the mystery books published “in Dutch. A book out of Venezuela. Mystery stories in Arabic.” Oil is the obvious connection, and once he sees the link he also begins to perceive that the murder has been ordered by someone in the “company,” a CIA exec, Leonard Atwood (Addison Powell). Is he a “damn good amateur” or just a fool? Perhaps he is both, as Jourbert suggests:

 

                            Condor is an amateur. He’s lost, unpredictable, perhaps  

                            sentimental. He could fool a professional. Not deliberately,

                            but precisely because he is lost, doesn’t know what to do.

 

     Turner, in short, is no “everyman,” not even a real human being, but is a figment of the writers’ imaginations, a man who can do incredible things when the script calls for it, and is dangerously innocent at other times. It is not that he is simply contradictory, but that he is an illusion: a man able to escape the most internecine machinations. A good man in an evil organization, Turner, nonetheless, might also be described as a kidnapper, robber, rapist, and murderer (although it is Jourbert, not he, who shoots Atwood dead)—even if these acts have been committed out of self-defense. It is his research and question, moreover, that has led to all of his co-worker’s deaths. He has saved himself only by destroying several others.

      Is it any wonder that by film’s end—although he has attempted to protect himself by recounting the facts in a sealed letter to The New York Times—he is destined to become, as Higgins suggests, “a very lonely man,” the film hinting that reading, in its isolation from the real, is a very dangerous profession.

     

Los Angeles, March 7, 2013

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2013).