The Cincinnati Kid

The Cincinnati Kid (Norman Jewison, 1965) One of the great poker movies, from a novel by Richard Jessup, written by Ring Lardner Jr. (the first studio film bearing his name after being blacklisted during the McCarthy era) and Terry Southern and directed by Norman Jewison.

That's the credits on the final film...and legitimately so. But, at the start of filming, everything was different. The film was originally bearing a screenplay by Paddy Chayevsky—who was warned by Steve McQueen (who had a lot of clout and would throw his weight around on-set) "I'm better at walking than talking"—re-written by Lardner and to be directed (in black and white) by Sam Peckinpah. The Hustler—a film about compulsive gambling (in that case, pool) to the detriment of life—had been a big hit and critical darling...and had picked up quite a few Oscar nominations. So, producer Martin Ransohoff must have had that in mind when this film was being cobbled together in pre-production.

Well, once filming started, Ronsohoff was shocked by the dailies Peckinpah was bringing in—there were scenes that didn't relate to the script—and fired him almost immediately (stories conflict on the details) and quickly hired Norman Jewison, who was most known for directing Doris Day movies, and the production was shut down, giving the new director time to re-assess and make changes. Charles Eastman and Terry Southern were hired to do some re-writing, and Jewison switched to color film—he thought filming red and black playing cards in black and white was counter-productive. 

Talk about gambling.

A New York Times story published Dec. 7th stated: "In trying to put “The Cincinnati Kid” before the cameras, Mr. Ransohoff and MetroGoldwyn ‐ Mayer have run through nearly every possible difficulty that can arise in contemporary Hollywood."

We meet "The Kid", Eric Stoner (McQueen) pitching pennies with a shoeshine boy (Ken Grant), who knows the Kid, knows his reputation and is in a hurry to beat him. Of course, he loses. And the Kid rubs it in: "You're just not ready for me yet." But, the youngster watches him saunter down the street with a lean and hungry look. Everybody will have that look at one point or another.

The Kid, you see, holds markers on everybody in New Orleans, which is fine except that he has to go across the river to dredge up a decent stud game, which—tonight—brought him $194 and the near-opportunity of a shiv between his ribs. But, there's a new game in town: Lancey Howard (Edward G. Robinson), "The Man", has stepped off a train in the city and is looking for action. The Shooter (Karl Malden), the best dealer in town and who's been bested by Howard in the past, knows The Kid wants to play against The Man, if only to prove he's the best in the game, and the Kid knows he can beat him. He knows it. Shooter had those dreams, too...once.

But, it's making him a bit preoccupied and more self-absorbed than he usually is. So much so that he's ignoring his girl Christian (Tuesday Weld) to the point where she's taking up with Shooter's bad-girl wife, Melba (Ann-Margret), who's so bad that she cheats at jigsaw puzzles. That's not Kitten with a Whip-bad...but it's bad as Chris is naive and Melba is anything but.

The Kid knows all about Melba's habits, but he's focused on the game and all-in. "Listen, Christian, after the game, I'll be The Man. I'll be the best there is. People will sit down at the table with you, just so they can say they played with The Man. And that's what I'm gonna be, Christian." She can't break through the wall of chips he's seeing, so she leaves town to go back to the folks'.

But, there's another game in town. Howard has an invitation to play stud with the very wealthy and very competitive William Jefferson Slade (Rip Torn) and the two go at it in a high-stakes 30 hour game that Slade ends up losing...to the tune of  six grand. And Slade doesn't like to lose...to anybody. Oh, he plays the Southern Gentleman just fine. But, he tells Shooter—who dealt the game—that he wants to "gut" the old man the way he feels gutted, and using Melba as a chip, coerces Shooter to slide the Kid the right cards in the inevitable match between them. This goes against everything Shooter believes in, but, with Melba in the mix...

It's gun-slingers meeting over green felt rather than the town square and Robinson is the fast-draw every twitchy trigger-finger kid wants to best. And just about everybody in the movie has skin in the game, if only to see The Man meet his match. With so much interest by outside parties, I come away (after a third viewing) convinced the game is rigged—the odds of the hand being dealt are very long—either 45,102,781 to 1 or 332,220,508,619 to 1, depending who you believe. But, it makes a good story, no matter the odds.

Steve McQueen's poker-face.

Jewison called it his "ugly duckling" film—given his short amount of pre-production time, how could it not?—and considered McQueen the most difficult actor he ever worked with (although he chose to work with him again!), but the film manages to hold up pretty well. There's just enough nodding to New Orleans to give it an exotic air, it's filled with with great actors—Dub Taylor, Ron Soble, Robert DoQui, Joan Blondell (!!), Jack Weston, Jeff Corey, Torn...and Cab Calloway (fer cryin' out loud!), how could it not be entertaining?

 

Yeah, there's issues. Script issues, mostly. But given the paper changing hands so often, and McQueen's way of up-ending tables for the sake of "image," it's surprising that it's as consistent as it is. The Kid zigs when he should zag a couple times—he's supposed to be savvy and be able to "read" people but he gets blind-sided too many times to believe it. 

Steve McQueen's poker-face, when he thinks he's winning.

And there's two endings—the one Jewison had in mind and one mandated by Ransohoff and the studio. The one I've seen the most I don't believe for a heart-beat. I'm out. But the one ending with the freeze-frame? That's aces.

One of the nicest thing about The Cincinatti Kid is the score by Lalo Schifrin, which includes

an End-Title song sung by the inimitable Ray Charles.

It's one of my favorite movie-songs, not only because of Charles

but because it uses the word "pyramid" as a verb.

Nightmare Alley (1947)

Nightmare Alley (Edmund Goulding, 1947) With Guillermo del Toro's remake in theaters, I thought it was a good idea to look at the original, notable because it's a film noir, the film that Tyrone Power thought was his best, and that it was withdrawn from circulation and unavailable for a long time—it was considered too dark and did not do well at the box office. But, it was revived after Power's death in 1958, and gained a reputation, enough to become a part of The Criterion Collection.

 

It was also produced by George Jessel. "That" George Jessel.

 

"Stan" Carlisle (Power) has a question. He's working for a traveling carnival as a "boob-catcher" and he's fascinated by the "geek," the freak show that attracts the most and lowest of the customers. "I don't understand how someone can get so low?" he asks Zeena (Joan Blondell) the fortune-teller and she has nothing to offer but "It can happen."

Stan can't imagine. He's on an upward spiral from a religious reform school to being on his own as an adult and barking for Mademoiselle Zeena, with her alcoholic husband Pete (Ian Keith) reduced to scrawling hidden answers on a chalkboard (when he's sober). He and Zeena used to be a great mind-reading act with a fool-proof code, but when Zeena started two-timing behind his back, Pete retreated to the bottle and never pulled himself out. A mind-reader is a terrible thing to waste.

Now, Stan is her partner in two-timing and wants that secret code and even offers to buy it from her, but Pete and Zeena aren't selling, seeing the code as being their nest egg once Pete can find it in him to sober up. And Stan is upping the ante by flirting with Molly (Colleen Gray), who is being minded by Bruno (Mike Mazurki) the carney's strong-man, able to see that she's attracted to the barker but too weak to do anything about it. The things that make or break a carnival are the attractions and right now, the most interesting things are going on behind the curtain. And sparks are flying back there.

Stan wants that code, staying as close to Pete as he can to pick up any secrets, but it back-fires on him. Unable to score any hootch from the carnival's Big Boss, he inveigles Stan to share his just acquired bottle of moonshine, which Stan has hidden away. Unfortunately, where Stan hid it was also the place the camp kept their wood alcohol and when he retrieves the stashed bottle, he picks up the wrong kind. Pete dies, and Stan fills the void by learning the code—taught to him by Zeena and Molly—to be her signaler in a new mentalist act that kills, and the success goes a bit to his head, using his secret knowledge and ability to "read" people to deflect the local sheriff from shutting the place down.

But, he's warned. Zeena also reads Tarot—or, as Blondell pronounces it "tarrot"—and the cards warn that Stan will come to a bad end, spelled out by the "hanged man" card which indicates sacrifice. Stan dismisses her worries as superstition, although she swears by the cards' abilities to predict fate. Nothing can prevent him from taking his new skills and trying to make a better life for himself, this time with Molly in tow, by developing a mentalist act among a higher-class clientele. A rube is a rube, and he prefers the ones with larger wallets.

Where Nightmare Alley gets interesting is when Stan and Molly's act becomes a success, and he soon becomes enticed by big offers with big pay-outs by the rich and powerful. By this time, completely cynical, he comes under the sway of Dr. Lilith Ritter (Helen Walker), a psychiatrist specializing in neuroses of the rich and, using her inside knowledge, runs a couple of long cons on a couple society big-wigs and hoping to parlay their donations into a church racket. To Stan, it's all the same racket, whether it's mentalism, psychiatry or religion—just different ways to separate people from their money—but Molly warns him that he's playing with fire, especially when he's pretending to become a spiritualist with a direct line to God. If only he had the power to predict the future...

Nightmare Alley is a cracker-jack little story that sits quite well in the film-noir category—despite the trappings of the mystic, that's all they are, trappings. But, the whole idea of the world populated by sheep for the right wolf to come along only to realize that fate is a hunter makes the movie as dark as pitch. And that's what appealed to Tyrone Power. Director Goulding had worked with him the year before, making The Razor's Edge, and one can see why, after years of matinee idol roles and swashbucklers, he wanted to test his image by playing an out-and-out bad guy. And it works. Stan Carlisle is charming, and Powers doesn't really have to change his acting style from the "star-quality" he was used to in order to play a con artist. The confidence of the star sells the connivance of the character without having to resort to villainous looks. Carlisle is a man who thinks he can get away with anything; he just hasn't realized his mental powers are not as good as he thinks they are.

Power, who loved flying, bought his own plane the same year as Nightmare Alley. He christened it "The Geek."

The Public Enemy

The Public Enemy (William Wellman, 1931) "Learn your lines, find your mark, look 'em in the eye and tell 'em the truth." That was James Cagney's recipe for good acting, succinct, humble, with plenty of lee-way to find your own path, and completely shy of the mark when it came to talking about how he did it. This gangster film was Cagney's first starring role—in fact, up until two weeks before filming, Edward Woods (who plays Tom Powers' best friend) was going to play the lead. But, there was something about the little guy with the bantam rooster's brio that made director William Wellman turn the tables on the roles.

It's the story of a rotten kid from a good family with all the contrary instincts to look out for a number one—himself—who has no moral compunctions about anybody else, that leads him down a precariously slippery slope at a time in history when society was providing an excellent opportunity for taking advantages of loop-holes in the law and morality. Pretty soon, "Tommy" is a booze-runner during Prohibition, and anybody getting in his way, even some he'd pledged loyalty to earlier, would find their way on the wrong end of his fist or the business end of his gun (and curiously, Cagney's Powers employs both the same way, with a forward thrust of the arm, as if fist and firearm were interchangeable).

It's a pretty standard morality—or immorality—tale. But, you watch Cagney do it his way and you never forget it. He's extremely charismatic, and like James Dean, does so in a way that separates him from everybody else. Where the rest of the cast—in one of the early talkies—is ramrod-stiff and talking with fine e-lo-cu-tion, Cagney is loose in everything, wrapping himself around furniture, spitting out his slang dialogue, and if there's a little dead-air, he throws in a little wise-crack in word or gesture for good measure. He's encouraged by Wellman, who takes a lot of chances in this pre-Code drama ("Did he just say what I think he said?" "Is that gesture in the credits what I think it means?"), and who sets up the tenor of the times in one masterful shot from a street corner's vantage-point, moving from a distillery to a corner-bar, following a pole of beer-buckets that crosses the path of a Salvation Army band. Wellman liked to play it rough—they used real bullets in a shot where masonry is picked off close to Cagney's head, and when Cagney is hit by the actor playing his sanctimonious brother, Cagney goes down like a ton of bricks—because Wellman told the other actor to clobber him, breaking a tooth in the process. And there's the famous grapefruit-in-the-face shot (making Mae Clarke something of a legend extending far beyond her career), that Wellman came up with—because he always imagined doing that to his own wife, who habitually ate half a grapefruit in the morning.

But, it's Cagney that's the Big Show. Watch the scene where he stands in the rain, luxuriantly eyeing his next targets, the guys who gunned down his buddy in the street. With murder on his mind, a smirk comes over his face, that turns into a fierce grin, then disappears into a grimace as he moves forward and walks right into the camera, like a ball of fire that can never be put out. 

Cagney's so good, he's scary.  

Cagney's Tom Powers with murder on his mind—that not even a downpour can douse.