Warners and the Great Depression.

There’s a special quality to the films that Warner Brothers (and First National) made in the first years of sound, when Daryl Zanuck was head of production.

At that stage the studio pay roll  had a large slice of the directors who would dominate the so called Golden Years of Hollywood - William Wellman, Howard Hawks, Michael Curtiz and William Dieterle not to mention Busby Berkley. Most had already proved they could handle major projects and were keeping their motors running with program fillers waiting for the big budget projects to come back after The Depression.  Surprisingly, people who would ultimately prove lesser talents were keeping pace with them - Merven Le Roy (Little Caesar), Alfred E. Green (Parachute Jumper), Archy Mayo (Petrified Forest), Loyd Bacon (42nd Street) and particularly Roy Del Ruth (Taxi) who Michael Powell admired.

My viewing these films has spread over a life time. Choice pieces in the early years of Australian television - the 1931 Ricardo Cortez Maltese Falcon / Danerous Female, Jimmy Cagney and Loretta Young in 1931’s Taxi, Ruby Keeler in the 1933 42nd Street or Georg Wilhelm Pabst’s 1934 Hollywood stop over for A Modern Hero - were followed by filling gaps with a London NFT season and decades later again picking my way through Amalgamated’s six hundred sixteen millimeter copies before they went into landfill and I’m not done yet. You Tube keeps on coughing up surprises.

Warners made operettas, society dramas and comedies. Le Roy’s Joe E. Brown vehicles were surprisingly lively. However Zanuck’s taste ran to the so called Social Movies, blue collar drama about disadvantage. Le Roy’s 1932 I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang is supposed to have started the ball rolling but it’s easy to see that one as another in the studio’s already established prison movie cycle.

I’ve already discussed the 1929 Frank Lloyd - Richard Barthelmess Weary River but even more obscure is 1930’s  Numbered Men directed by Le Roy. It can be seen as a further stage in the Warner prison movie cycle following Weary River and anticipating I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, 20,000 Years in Sing Sing, Each Dawn I Die, Invisible Stripes and the rest.

Not much of a movie but an interesting step towards the more substantial films, Numbered Men has William Holden (Mark I) playing the warden as he did in Weary River. He has contempt for Hard Man prisoner Ralph Ince. “Callaghan doesn’t even possess the honour that’s supposed to exist among thieves.” Young Raymond Hacket (in the Ruth Chatterton Madam X) longs for red head sweetie Bernice Claire (Broadway’s “No No Nanette”) whose picture he carries. Forger Conrad Nagel (“Better than some now who are walking around”) relaxes in the privilege room and predicts the dismal outcome of young Hacket’s romance. George Cooper plays  harmonica. Ivan Linow is going stir crazy. 

Claire and Hacket

Best passage is the opening establishing Stoneyhurst State Penitentiary’s numbered inmates deprived even of the humanity that using their names offers. We get a few interesting opticals like the marching prisoners visible through the defused gap in the bars, anticipating Byron Haskin’s great titles for 20,000 Years in Sing Sing. Villainous Maurice Black’s face is supered on the dialogue describing him.

The trustworthy inmates get access to the library and become eligible for the road gang where there are only a few guards and prisoners work in the open. Incentives include their doughnut nights at Blanche Friderici’s farm kitchen.

Ince engineers a prison riot which is a brief highlight - starting in a real machine shop and having shots of prisoners stampeding in one direction while those seen through windows behind them are running back. This halts as the rioters come up against the wall of steel bars.

Garbo with Corrad Nagel : The Kiss

Plausibility is completely shot when Hacket’s fiancée turns up working at the farm. Villain Black, escapees Ince and Linow and road gang members Nagel, Hacket and Cooper all converge there where “the keester man” explosive expert stores a case of dynamite - which doesn’t get to fill its promise. However farmer rustic Tully Marshall  is hunting a chicken hawk with a rifle which will get into the final action as the warden arms the trustees to go out and get Ince who has locked Claire in the cupboard threatening “I’ll knock ya to Jersey if ya double cross me.”

This one has come to terms with early sound film form but it’s plot and handling don’t convince or involve. Nagel, star of the first dramatic sound film, Curtiz' Tenderloin, was considered to have the ideal speaking voice for early sound. He is the only one who can read the awful dialogue with conviction.

Warner streetscape :Under 18

A year later (1931 released ‘32) and the rapid growth of the studio’s film making is instantly visible in Archy Mayo’s Under 18. The house style is  fully developed. Their bustling urban ambiance registers in the film’s first few shots of the the working class wedding spilling into the street from a tenement flat in Maude Eburne’s rooming house. Marian Marsh (quite appealing - she claimed to be nineteen) is wearing the bride’s veil but it’s borrowed from her sister Anita Page (Broadway Melody of 1929) who is pairing with pool hall champ Norman Foster - later to direct the 1943 Welles Journey into Fear. Marian works as a seamstress in Paul Porcasi’s Ritz Fashion Salon and is sparking grocery truck driver Regis Toomey.

Under 18 : Wedding day - Page and Marsh

Comes the depression - three shot montage including dad J. Farrel McDonald’s grave marker and the young couple are arguing in the night heat, sitting on the trash can outside her family tenement block, when the well turned out mistress living there gets into her car. The film is determinedly Pre-Code, offering yet another of those familiar dressing room sequences, with lots of glamorously presented women getting in and out of their scanties, and lead Marsh’s endangered virtue the is central plot dynamic.

Like Nancy Carroll in Personal Maid or a squad of other Pre-Code worker heroines, Marian is on about “I’m sick of being poor.” She’s saving ten dollars a week so she can get somewhere better for mum Emma Dunn to live. Things deteriorate when sister Page comes back home with a baby and her out of work husband who shows no interest in the job adds. After he blacks her eye, Page wants a divorce but lawyer Clarence Wilson demands two hundred dollars to get her name down before they close the quarter’s court ticket.

William and Marsh

 

 

 

 

The kept girl mannequins at the show room can’t help. They only have furs and jewels, not money they could spend on boys, and boss Porcasi is more interested in his own tootsie. Marian sees only one way out. Rich customer Warren William’s attention picked up when Porcasi had her model a fur coat while the regular girls were at lunch and she retrieved the orchid corsage his partner discarded to take home to her mum.  Marian is resolved to offer herself to Warren. She quits Regis and heads for Williams’ extravagantly art directed sky scraper pent house where a wild pool party is in progress.  A rejected playboy throws into the water the pearls that his fed up squeeze hurled back at him, for the swimmers to dive for.

Warren has a wardrobe full of bathing suits - all her size like Zachary Scott’s Monte Berrigan in Mildred Pierce. He and Marian are negotiating. This is the point where the film develops genuine tension. Regis has followed her and, punching low, decks Warren who is found on the floor apparently dead. The police arrive but Marian manages to beat them to the thirty floor elevator and puts in a call to warn Regis.

From these cascading calamities they manage to generate a happy ending.

Marsh  keeps on getting big glamor close ups in the belief that she had star potential but she

and long serving Toomey (best as the glimpsed motif common man character in the Capra Meet John Doe) are just going through the motions while Williams’ relaxed study in seedy charm has real authority.  A couple of the support players make their walk-ons register - attentive butler Murray Kinnell and the Universal’s Dracula and Frankenstein’s Edward Van Sloan as a scornful fashion house flunky. They show up the limits of the romantic lead duo whose careers will fade. The tenement people are just grotesques.

Marsh in scanties, Van Sloan and Porcasi.

It is interesting that the rich buying sex in these films are not condemned. Genders are reversed in the 1933 Curtiz-Dieterle-Wellman Warner Female where Ruth Chatterton rewards proto body builder Phillip Reed with a spot in Paris while lesser escorts are shipped to Melbourne - they got that right. These anticipate John Baxter's 1941 Love on the Dole, 1976’s Claude Sautet Mado or 1990’s Pretty Woman. The practice among the less well off is associated with criminality and degradation as in the post WW2 exploitation cycles. What this tells you about film makers is speculative.

These two Depression era films are minor examples of the Warner contemporary cycle, not the work of their best film makers. Le Roy would shift into the manufactured gloss of MGM, though he did turn his working relationship with Robert Taylor into one of it’s best examples with Johnny Eager in 1941 and Mayo emerged honorably from the opportunity 1936's The Petrified Forest offered him.

Petrified Forest - Leslie Howard, Dick Foran, Bette Davis, Humphrey Bogart.

I think it’s significant that after a lifetime of mining this material I’m still finding unfamiliar titles that I enjoy. There’s a Warner Archive DVD of  Numbered Men. The  You Tube copy is soso but their Under 18 is nice.

Barrie Pattison 2020