The Bride Came C.O.D.

The Bride Came C.O.D. (William Keighley, 1941) Supposedly, the idea was that Cagney wanted to do something lighter than his typical tough-guy gangster act, brought in his brother to produce, hired the sharp twins-writing team of Julius and Philip Epstein and started casting about for the romantic lead to play opposite him. Ann Sheridan, Ginger Rogers, Rosalind Russell, and Olivia de Havilland were all in the mix at some point. But, somehow, Bette Davis got the part. Evidently, she wanted a change of pace from her dramatic roles and she and Cagney got on famously making Jimmy the Gent seven years earlier, so...why not?

 

But, did anybody consider the trouble that might come from putting the two biggest rabble-rousers on the Warner lot starring together in the same movie? One or two of the studio brothers might have been asleep at the switch, but the film did get made with neither of the stars being "suspended" but up-staged by some of the wiliest character actors ever in supporting roles.

The story is alarmingly close to Capra's It Happened One Night: A socialite, Joan Winfield (Davis) is sand-bagged with a marriage proposal in front of a night-club audience by her bandleader boyfriend, Allan Brice (Jack Carson), who is prodded into making the announcement by gossip columnist (Stuart Erwin) under deadline. Under pressure, she agrees, but California having a 72 hour waiting period before they can get hitched creates a problem. It's decided—by the scandal-monger—that they can fly to Vegas to tie the knot sooner. When her father (the booming Eugene Pallette) finds out he's apoplectic; he doesn't want the wedding to go through at all!

That's where cash-strapped pilot Steve Collins (Cagney) makes a landing in this mess. He's about to have his plane repo'd, but makes a deal with "Pater" Lucius K. Winfield to make a unscheduled stop from Las Vegas to Amarillo, Texas (where the father will pick her up), but with Joan only and it's been negotiated for his standard freight rate—$10 a pound. When the wedding party shows up at the local air-strip, the bridegroom-to-be and the mouth-piece are coaxed off the plane by Collins' mechanic Pee Wee (George Tobias, remembered best as neighbor Mr. Kravitz on the "Bewitched" TV series) and the pilot takes off with the prospective bride much to her protest. Technically, it's kidnapping, even if it's for hire.

But, Joan is a fierce fighter and once she gets ahold of a parachute, she'd determined to jump out of the plane en route, foiled by Collins banking the plane and throwing her—repeatedly—back into the cabin. But, all that maneuvering causes the plane to stall, and they end up crashing in the desert, close to the ghost-town of Bonanza that had sprung up around the old Enterprise mine. Hilarity ensues. The comedy is broad, bordering on slapstick, what with prat-falls and Joan constantly falling into cactus plants ("Oh, there must be something magnetic to a cactus that attracts me right to it...or vice versa!"). And Davis plays it broadly, trying to eke out the last drop of humor from any given situation...while Cagney just reacts to what she's doing, with either exaggerated laughter or venom.

In Bonanza, things get more complicated, what with search-parties looking for the pair under the command of William Frawley, and the town's only existing citizen (Harry Davenport) a mass of eccentricities and a way of changing sides at the drop of a plot-point. Soon, Collins is in jail, Joan goes on a wild desert ride in a flivver, and both end up lost in that abandoned mine, all the while waiting for either the fiancee or the father or both to show up before anything can get resolved. Cagney's character remains a bit stalwart, but Davis' changes her mind every ten minutes of movie-time. Things are further confounded with the minutiae of state law, matrimonial provisions, and some dubious reverse psychology. If everything was under federal law things would be a lot simpler, but the plot wouldn't go anywhere. State laws are funnier and more suited for comedy.

The movie was popular when it came out, and, as something changes every few minutes, one can see why audiences found it entertaining. And while Davis is out of her element, she is amusing, and Cagney doesn't fall easy victim to caricature until his laughing scenes. The only one who really disliked the film, in fact, was Davis, who didn't like the script, hated the desert heat of Death Valley, and was no fan of cactus, as she evidently did fall into one while filming. It's a light-weight vehicle pushed by two powerful steam-engines, so it's a bit of a mismatch. But, seeing the two play off each other rather seamlessly is the film's greatest strengths.

Each Dawn I Die

Each Dawn I Die (William Keighley, 1939) Edgy newspaper reporter Frank Ross (James Cagney) has a hot news lead, but it gets buried when the crooked assistant D.A. he's trying to get the goods on, knocks him cold, douses him in whiskey, and puts him behind the wheel of a car and sends it caroming down a city street, ultimately killing three innocents. Ross is convicted of vehicular manslaughter and thrown in jail, his campaign against the crooked DA (who is trying to run for governor) quashed.  

On the outside the folks in the newsroom his reporting partner (Jane Bryan) and his editor are trying to dig deep to find out how to get around the lawyers, and inside Frank tries to stay alive, getting information from fellow prisoners in the sweat-shops, and even saving the life of "Hood" Stacey (George Raft), who, to repay the debt, cooks up a hair-brain scheme to find  who framed Ross. When another inmate is killed, Ross names Stacey, in order for the gangster to be tried, and make it easier for him to escape.

Not very likely. Stacey does escape, however, but reneges on his plan, making one more set-back for Ross, who is slowly going crazy with his prison-term, and the impossibility of finding out who's responsible while stuck behind bars.

No, it's not very credible, but the points of interest in the story are Cagney, who pushes the boundaries of what "good guy" behavior can entail and Raft, who's smooth, wry, likable, and utterly corrupt. This makes him completely different from the crooked DA who isn't witty, isn't smooth, and is dully cruel, but is also utterly corrupt. So, the difference between good and evil (in its shades of gray) in the audience's affection is that "bad" must also be personally bad, and incapable of entertaining us. If you can entertain us, obviously you can't be that bad a guy, even capable of reforming. But, what separates this from other Warner Bros. efforts of the period is that the authorities, although personifications of fear and threat, are also completely fallible and downright evil. The "good guys" are the "bad guys" and that's something a little different in a post-"Code" gangster movie.

The Street with No Name

The Street with No Name (William Keighley, 1948) Another of the odd docu-dramas Filmed in the real locations (but not better actors) that studio 20th Century Fox made in the 1940's with the FBI's full co-operation. As with the earlier example, The House on 92nd Street, Lloyd Nolan once again plays FBI inspector George Briggs who hires a new agent recruit to infiltrate a violent gangster racket run by one Alec Stiles (Richard Widmark, a year after tearing up the screen in Kiss of Death). Mark Stevens plays the mole, George Cordell, while a young John McIntire (wait a minute, he looks old in this one, too!) is his chief contact with the Feds. The Stiles gang is high on fashion, but low on smarts with the exception of Stiles, who's big on intricately worked out by-the-book schemes, secret rooms inside warehouses and likes to do a lot of whining about his gang, his moll, and probably the government, too, if he actually paid taxes. He takes a personal interest in Cordell (working under the alias of George Manley) and personally hires him as part of his mob.

The movie builds to a violent climax with anybody-who's-anybody in the cast all in the same place dodging bullets and daggers and hiding in all the spacious blackness that director Keighley and cinematographer Joe MacDonald (he shot My Darling Clementine, Call Northside 777, and Pickup on South Street) can offer. It's a minor noir, curious only for Widmark's early work and the spare elements of the truthiness at FBI Headquarters, which are less on display than The House on 92nd Street. This would be the last film of its type to have the full co-operation of the FBI until James Stewart starred in The FBI Story in 1959, and, of course the TV series "The F.B.I." starring Efrem Zimbalist, Jnr.

Well...almost. The script for The Street with No Name ended up being recycled for another, better film for Fox, which we'll talk about next week.