by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Day of
Reckoning, a really quirky 1933 film
from MGM, directed by Charles Brabin (who had a troubled career at the biggest
Hollywood dream factory because his taste ran more towards nightmares; his
career never really recovered from being fired from the silent Ben-Hur but he made such quirky and dark movies as The
Beast of the City, The Mask of Fu Manchu and this one) from a script by Zelda Sears and Eve Greene whose
synopsis on the Turner Classic Movies Web site — “A
man’s nagging wife drives him to crime” — is accurate but hardly indicates the
bizarre tale we’re about to see. From the description I imagined what we’d be
seeing was a tale of a seemingly normal suburban marriage in which the wife’s
incessant demands for luxury items and the money to buy them would slowly but
surely drive her husband to ever more desperate measures to get money,
ultimately leading him to crime. The way Sears and Green structured their
script, though, all that has already happened before the movie begins: John Day
(Richard Dix) is having a birthday party at his home, and he briefly questions
his wife Dorothy (Madge Evans) as to whether they can afford the elaborate
dress she got for the occasion and the piano she recently ordered, but then
decides to let things slide. At the party, their faithful maid Mamie (Una
Merkel — TCM showed this on Monday, December 10 as part of a birthday tribute
to her) wakes John and Dorothy’s kids (a three-year-old son and an infant
daughter — the daughter isn’t listed in the credits but the son, Johnny, is
played by Spanky McFarland of the Our Gang, a.k.a. Little Rascals, comedies Hal Roach was then producing for MGM release) so they can see
dad blow out the candles on his cake (he doesn’t quite get them all).
The party
is interrupted by two people who look like gangsters but are actually cops, and
John follows them into the kitchen where they tell him they’re there to arrest
him for embezzling from the building and loan company he works for. Family
friend George Hollins (Conway Tearle) offers to help by hiring John an
attorney, O’Farrell (Samuel S. Hinds), but we’ve already seen Hollins flirting
with Dorothy and so we’re suspicious of his motives from the start. Our
suspicions are, of course, proved right: O’Farrell promises John that if he
pleads guilty he can get probation as a first offender, but the judge sentences
John to two years in county jail and a later scene between O’Farrell and
Hollins reveals that the lawyer deliberately threw the case at Hollins’ order
so, with John out of the way, Hollins can cruise and ultimately seduce Dorothy.
The film then cuts back and forth between John’s stint in jail — there’ve been
some recent scandalous reports that conditions in county jails are sometimes worse
than those in state prisons, and that’s
certainly true here: in one chilling scene, the prisoners are served barely
edible hash scooped out of a slops bucket, and of course John refuses to eat
the swill — and one of his fellow prisoners eagerly grabs his uneaten food —
and Dorothy’s life. Since she’s in need of money and has to go to work, Hollins
offers her a job as part of his secretarial pool even though she only types
with two fingers and makes a mess of every piece of work she’s assigned to do —
which only attracts the ire of Hollins’ head secretary, Kate Lovett (Isabel
Jewell, who turns in the movie’s best performance even though her part is
surprisingly short). Kate, it turns out, is not only Hollins’ head secretary
but also the former mistress he’s dumping in his lust for Dorothy, and Kate’s
all too well aware of it; when she gives Hollins the her-or-me ultimatum
Hollins fires her. Meanwhile, at the
prison one of John’s fellow inmates, Slim (James Bell), has a nervous breakdown
when he gets a dear-John letter from his wife, who had promised to wait for him
so they could open a shop together when he got released, but in the meantime
she’s fallen for another man and wants a divorce.
Partly because Dorothy is no
longer visiting him on every visiting day, as she was before, and partly from Slim’s
experience, John is becoming more and more convinced that Dorothy is seeing
someone else — though he doesn’t put two and two together enough to realize who. Meanwhile, Kate Lovett, jealous over being dumped and fired by Hollins, follows him to Dorothy’s house, catches
her and Hollins at just the moment when she’s finally about to yield to his
advances, and shoots and kills Dorothy. The police can’t decide whether Hollins
or Kate committed the murder, so they arrest both of them and put Hollins in the
same jail as John — who learns of these events when his convict friend Harry
(Paul Hurst) slips him the newspaper covering the affair, saying, “You’ll find
out about it anyway.” John catches Hollins in the hallway of the jail and beats
him so badly he needs hospitalization. Hart (Raymond Hatton), another inmate
friend of John’s, warns Hollins not to “squeal” on who attacked him. John
pretends to be sick so he can be put in the ward near Hollins, and one day when
Hollins has been allowed to sunbathe on the roof of the jail because his doctor
has said it would be good for him, John attacks him and the two have a fight
that leaves them both hanging off the
roof — though ultimately it’s Hart, not John, who pushes Hollins off the roof
and then rescues John. Eventually John is released after his sentence ends and
Mamie, who took John’s kids to the country and the dairy farm she ran with her
parents so the state couldn’t grab them and put them in foster care, takes John
in, gets her folks to give him a job and a place to live in, and finally
accepts the marriage proposal of her parents’ milkman, Jerry (Stuart Erwin, in
a surprisingly low-keyed part for him — or is it that it’s just so short that
his whining doesn’t get as oppressive as it did in some of his longer roles?).
Day
of Reckoning is a rag-bag of movie clichés,
but it’s one of those films in which the clichés are deployed sufficiently
inventively that there’s real uncertainty as to how it’s going to work out, and
Brabin’s direction is mostly straightforward but occasionally gets stylish. The
best part of the film is the murder sequence — we see a black-gloved hand
parting the shrubs in front of the Day home’s window and its owner as a shadowy
figure entering, and after the shooting Brabin jump-cuts to two Black inmates
at the jail, a singer-dancer and a one-man band backing him, doing a peppy
amateur dance number for the other inmates’ entertainment. According to the American
Film Institute Catalog, MGM originally
wanted Richard Barthelmess to play John, but he wanted too much money for the
role — a good thing, because Dix is a much better actor and puts far more authority and emotion into the part —
and the Hollywood Reporter announced
that Genevieve Tobin was going to be in the film, but she wasn’t. (My guess is
that she was probably being considered for the role played by Isabel Jewell.) Day
of Reckoning was the only film Richard Dix
made at MGM, and in overall theme and style it seems much more like something
Warners would have made — and because of Brabin’s dark sensibility and Dix’s
authority it worked a lot better than most of MGM’s attempts to poach on
Warners’ territory.
