King of the Roaring Twenties: The Story of Arnold Rothstein

Saturday is traditionally "Take Out the Trash" Day here.

King of the Roaring Twenties: The Story of Arnold Rothstein (aka The Big Bankroll) (Joseph M. Newman, 1961) In the early 1960's, "the Roaring 20's" was a big deal. "The Untouchables" was on TV and there was even a series called..."The Roaring 20's." It seemed to break up the glut of westerns, gumshoes, and family-comedies—as well as the Kefauver Hearings—that saturated small screens in the 1950's.  

Amidst all this, there were a spate of low-budget movies that also looked back at those days, but it was not what you would call a trend. Mickey Rooney starred as "Baby Face" Nelson. Rod Steiger as Al Capone. Charles Bronson as "Machine Gun" Kelly. There was Studs Lonigan. Just before this film was The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond.

And at the tail end of the cycle was King of the Roaring 20's: The Story of Arnold Rothstein. Rothstein was featured in Legs Diamond. Nicknamed "The Brain", he is credited with putting the "organized" into organized crime, turning the scatter-shot "wild west" approach of mobstering into a business model of bankrolling potential racketeering schemes (but just be advised to check your receipts). I suppose at the end of the film-cycle, after finishing all the tommy-gun action, they had to include the accountants. You're not done until you do the paperwork.

KOTR2:TSOAR (geez, even the abbreviation is too long!) follows Rothstein's rise  in turn of the century New York as a troublesome kid-grifter (played by Jimmy Baird), giving the local police guff and his upright, serious father (Joseph Schildkraut) so much tsuris for not applying his mathematical gifts to rabbinical studies like his older brother. Rothstein (eventually played by David Janssen) would rather calculate odds and gamble, and eventually, partnering first with a neighborhood pal (Mickey Rooney) on booking centers and poker networks and then with "Big Tim" O'Brien (Jack Carson) on casinos and bigger game.

The film is a little vague on what made Rothstein so successful, other than a careful sizing up of the percentages, making sure that he got his cut and finding strategies that would either undercut the pay-out to his partners or negotiate deals that would have lucrative rewards to himself if his partners screwed up and have to sell out.

One such long con is the eventual prosecution of a tarnished cop (Dan O'Herlihy) who always made sure Rothstein got nicked from boyhood on. The obsession—at least in Jo Swerling's treatment (his last credit)—would prove to be his undoing, as well as a long-held desire to win a poker game with a royal flush. Everything else is as spur-of-the-moment as a dice-roll, and with as much attention as that requires, such as selling out his friends and a "fair-weather" marriage to a chorus girl (Dianne Foster).

That would take somebody extraordinarily charismatic to pull off, and the saddest thing about King of the Roaring 20's is that David Janssen, fine as an actor as he could be, is incapable of doing it. Always an interior kind of actor—as he proved in his long stretch as TV's "The Fugitive"—Janssen is more than capable of luring the audience in and winning their respect if not sympathy, without resorting to theatrics. But here the role is so repellant than no amount of casual inscrutability provokes any interest. And his lack of remorse—or much of anything beyond surface cool—inspires nothing but our own indifference. The audience reflects the performance.

It's too bad because the cast is flush with good character actors—Rooney, O'Herlihy, William Demarest, Keenan Wynn, Diana Dors (in a "blink-and-you'll-miss-her" role), and, one of my favorites, Jack Carson in his last role before his death. But, they're circling around an empty suit, and there's not even enough venom in Janssen's performance to inspire that he get his just desserts, which occurs in a contrivance that's too "on-the-nose." All the way around, the movie's just a bad bet.