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.

The Male Animal

The Male Animal (Elliott Nugent, 1942) The draw for this one wasn't the director or the stars (although I'm a big fan of Henry Fonda and Jack Carson). 

 

It's the author, James Thurber. Probably a name past it's sell-date in many people's minds, but his legacy in the zeitgeist has burrs that stick. The phrase "My World and Welcome To it"—which was the title of a book he authored and a TV series inspired by him—is attached to Thurber. He was also the author of "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" and it was adapted for the movies, first (in 1947) starring Danny Kaye and (just a few years ago) one directed and starring Ben Stiller. 

The man was, obviously, a writer, and quite well-known in his time. He was also a cartoonist—appearing in The New Yorker—a playwright, and (as the phrase goes) "a celebrated wit." He was a good enough writer that he probably never used the phrase "a celebrated wit" in regards to himself or anyone else. Thurber wrote the original play with this film's director, Elliott Nugent, and it was adapted for the screen by Stephen Morehouse Avery and the celebrated Casablanca team of twin-brothers Julius J. and Philip G. Epstein.

It takes place in modern times at Midwestern University, where football is the driving force for the college-town rather than higher education. And the weekend of Homecoming with its anticipated game against Minnesota and the return of All-American Joe Ferguson (Carson) for the first time in six years, the streets are filled with flivvers and bobby-soxers and impromptu rallies through the streets. Everyone is in a fervor and rah-rah-ing on a testosterone high (and little thinking to anything else).

So, it's a bad time for there to be any little contretemps on campus, with the boosters and city officials schmoozing around and their blood pressure already on the boil. Even if something is a little subtle in its nuance, it will turn into a cut-and-dried cage-match in arguable hues of black-and-white. It wouldn't seem to be a bad time for English professor Tommy Turner (Fonda) to announce his planned readings for the Monday after the game with the theme of "English prose by non-English speakers). Dull stuff...not unlike Turner, himself. Except Turner has a sister-in-law (Joan Leslie). Sister-in-law has a boyfriend (Herbert Anderson), who's the editor of the campus newspaper and in Turner's class. Said boyfriend writes an editorial in said newspaper praising the professor for including anarchist Bartolomeo Vanzetti in that list of non-English speakers.

What's the American word for "contretemps?" Taken in context, it must be when you object to something without having read it, or seen it, but you'd "heard something about it." Sure glad something like that wouldn't happen today (he said sarcastically).

By the way, the passage that is being objected to is this:

If it had not been for these things, I might have lived out my life talking at street corners to scorning men. I might have died, unmarked, unknown, a failure. Now we are not a failure. Never in our full life can we hope to do such work for tolerance, for justice, for man's understanding of man, as now we do by accident. Our words - our lives - our pains - nothing! The taking of our lives - lives of a good shoemaker and a poor fish peddler - all! That last moment belongs to us - that agony is our triumph.

Gentleman Jim

Gentleman Jim (Raoul Walsh, 1942) It's all background in this Errol Flynn vehicle, as the audience focuses on Flynn portraying boxer "Gentleman" Jim Corbett as he serves as point-man (chin variety) for the gentrification of the pugilistic sport. As we fade in the first rule  of the fight game is "nobody talks about the fight game." Not in polite society anyway. As it is, floating boxing matches are staged hectically before the police can find out and they regularly end, not with the sound of a bell, but the sound of a gavel in a courtroom. Once "Johnny Law" gets wind of the fight (or hears the sound of one, they're fairly rambunctious affairs), they descend, the crowd scattering as they round up fighters and fans alike. It's all strictly word-of-mouth, grudge matches, really, the only civility being those of the Marquis of Queensbury—and anybody who's seen Wilde knows what a toad he was.

But Corbett brings some civility to the hammering blows, even to the point of impressing heavyweight champion John L. Sullivan (Ward Bond), who goes so far as to meet up with Corbett at a post-match soiree to congratulate him for being the man who took him down. 

Walsh contrasts the match fighting (which takes up relatively little screen-time) with Corbett's efforts to rise in the ranks of Society, as well as in the ring standings, learning to exploit his victories to promote himself to the hoi polloi as well as fight promoters.  It's the burgeoning of the age of sports figures as superstars, and not thugs, rising above gutter tactics and championing their skills as valuable commodities to the elite, giving the rich a taste of the hard-scrabble competition they've left behind.

It's a natural extension of Flynn's persona as a cavalier, being the winking bad boy who's naughty to all the right people, but especially to the really bad ones—the jaunty trickster with a gleam in his eye, who'll find a way to get ahead...by left hook or by crook, the competent high-wire artist in marked contrast to buddy Walter Lowrie (Jack Carson, one of my favorite character actors), the lovable schlub who plays pilot-fish to Corbett's shark, never able to achieve success, but omnipresent to enjoy it for him.

Olde Review: Stage Door

The following was part of a series reviewing the ASUW film series at the University of Washington that were broadcast on KCMU-FM in 1976--I found the old scripts and thought it might be interesting to post them here--with no editorial alteration or comment. I have no doubt that my attitude to some of these films has changed over the years--ageing does that--but to just erase my opinions from back then and tack on my new-found objections would do a disservice to the reviewer who was just a "stinky kid" back then. It'd be like making Greedo shoot first.

Stage Door (Gregory LaCava, 1937) It's hard to say what I like best about Stage Door--not the story, it's pretty much the "tough-road-on-the-way-to-success" trope. But the dialogue is original--snappy and delivered at a break-neck pace, sometimes overlapping (and you don't see that very often in modern movies)* It all tends to make watching old-time movies invigorating.

Maybe it's the acting, delivered by an all-star cast headed by Ginger Rogers (again), Gail Patrick as a primary sufferer, Lucille Ball as a wicked-tongued Seattle-ite (but don't hold it against me), (and) Eve Arden as an aspiring actress who is permanently attached to a cat. All live together in various stages of animosity when Katherine Hepburn makes another of her grand entrances and proceeds to steal the movie as easily as candy from a bunch of talented babies. Her role is somewhat autobiographical--rich society girl trying to make it into acting because it's a thrill and it's different. To see newcomer Hepburn--a small strap of a girl squaring off against a star-since-silent-days Adolphe Menjou and run acting rings around him is a certifiable thrill. It's Hepburn that is best about this movie, but then Hepburn has always been one of the best things about the movies.
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* Well, you did if you saw any Robert Altman movies at the time, and I'm sure I did--at least Nashville and California Split and M*A*S*H and The Long Goodbye! But the last movie I saw where the movie was seriously over-lapping and going at this pace was Clooney's Leatherheads (and I think I was the only one...)

I notice I neglected to mention such stars of the future as Ann Miller and Jack Carson (one of my favorites). Well, these things could only be two minutes long...and it should be noted that this is the film where the Hepburn trademark line "The calla lilies are in bloom a-gain!" came from. Any actress or comedian who wanted to do a quick impression of Katherine Hepburn (in the days before Martin Short) would just say that line and people would immediately get the connection.

One interesting little piece of trivia:  Gail Patrick was the long-time executive producer of the "Perry Mason" TV-series.

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.