by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I watched a
movie, and I decided to pick one with a Christmas theme and settled on The
Lemon Drop Kid, a 1951 Paramount vehicle
for Bob Hope based on a Damon Runyon story that they had previously filmed in
1934 with Lee Tracy as star and the underrated Marshall “Mickey” Neilan as
director. (Neilan had drunk himself out of a major-studio career but his
direction of the independent race movie Chloe had produced a surprise hit and won him a chance
at a comeback at the majors, though it didn’t last long and he only worked as a
director for three more years, though he lived until 1958 and acted in a small
part as a U.S. Senator in A Face in the Crowd a year before he died.) The Lemon Drop Kid was made at a time when Damon Runyon’s popularity
was at its peak even though he had died in 1942; Hope had previously appeared
in another film based on a Runyon story, Sorrowful Jones, in 1948 and it had been a blockbuster hit and a
major career boost for his co-star, Lucille Ball. What’s more, Guys and
Dolls, the Frank Loesser-Abe
Burrows musical based on Runyon’s stories, had opened on Broadway in 1950 and
become the most popular musical to that time, so in this film Runyon is the only person who gets above-the-title billing. The
Lemon Drop Kid also is noteworthy as the
film that introduced the holiday classic “Silver Bells,” first warbled in his
usual tone-deaf manner by William Frawley (who also appeared in the 1934
version and in this one plays a Runyonesque lumpen character recruited by Hope to be a bell-ringing
Santa Claus) and then sung on Paramount’s “New York Street” set by Hope and his
leading lady, Marilyn Maxwell (the other blonde movie star named Marilyn with a second name beginning with
“M”!). The arrangement of the song, punctuated by the street bells Hope and
Maxwell are supposedly ringing, indicates that the “suits” at Paramount were
hoping this song would become a mega-hit on the order of “White Christmas,” and
while it didn’t reach that level of popularity, it did make the charts (thanks to a recording by,
of all people, Bing Crosby, Hope’s lifelong friend off-screen and bitter rival
on-screen) and become a seasonal standard.
The Lemon Drop Kid begins where any film based on Damon Runyon’s work
ought to begin: at a horse-racing track, this one in Florida, where Sidney
Milburn (Hope) — who’s been given the nickname “The Lemon Drop Kid” based on
his fondness for that sort of candy — is talking to a horse. If this were a
Hope-Crosby Road movie the horse would
probably have answered him back in English, but instead Hope simply asks the
horse who’s going to win the race it’s in and the horse answers with normal
horse-noises. All this is supposed to prove to the customers at the racetrack
that the Kid has inside information about the races, and he seems to be making
his money by giving tips on every horse and then collecting from whichever bettor he sold on the horse
which actually won. Only one of his customers turns out to be the girlfriend of
gangster Moose Moran (Fred Clark), and he talks her out of putting $2,000 of
Moran’s money on the horse that eventually wins and instead gets her to bet on
the horse that finishes an embarrassing last. Moran kidnaps the Kid and tells
him to pay him $10,000 — the amount his $2,000 bet would have paid off if it
had been placed on the horse he wanted in the first place — by Christmas Day, or
else — and he gives the Kid a
look at three of his thugs working over a man who cost him money just to show
what will happen to him if he doesn’t pay off. The Kid is broke, and in order
to raise the money he goes to New York City (if he’s so broke, how does he get
there?) and hits up his old girlfriend “Brainey” Baxter (Maxwell), who works at
a nightclub owned by Oxford Charlie (Lloyd Nolan). Charlie is in love with
Brainey, but Brainey loves the Kid — only she’s getting more and more impatient
with him because he won’t marry her. The Kid runs into another old friend,
Nellie Thursday (Jane Darwell, whom Hope insisted be billed fourth and in the
same type size as his own name), who’s been waiting 20 years for her
safecracker husband to be paroled, only now that he’s got a parole date she’s
got no place to take him because she’s just been evicted. The Kid sees a
bell-ringer Santa Claus (obviously patterned on the real ones from the
Salvation Army, though the actual agency’s name is never mentioned) and decides
to use the same gimmick himself, dressing in an ill-fitting Santa suit and
ringing his own bell — only he gets busted by the police for not having a city
license and Brainey has to bail him out. Nonetheless, this gives him an idea;
he’ll take over Moose Moran’s old casino, now closed after a police raid;
reopen it as the “Nellie Thursday Home for Old Dolls,” and organize as a
quasi-legitimate charity with a city license.
Since Nellie is a sort of mascot
among New York’s criminal classes, the Kid recruits the city’s lower-level
gangsters to be his Santa Clauses — including Gloomy Willie (William Frawley),
who’s only billed eighth but is one of the most entertaining parts of this
movie, turning in a standout performance that warmed him up for his coming bout
with immortality as Fred Mertz on I Love Lucy. There’s an unexpectedly poignant moment when the
Kid catches Willie with a bottle on his person and says, “Santy Claus don’t
drink” — and Willie replies, “Then how come he’s always falling down chimneys?”
The poignancy comes from Frawley’s real-life status as a recovering alcoholic,
which almost cost him the Fred Mertz role; CBS didn’t want to risk that one of
the series’ principals would fall off the wagon and miss work, and Desi Arnaz
had to put his own prestige and money on the line to guarantee that Frawley
would stay sober and able to work — which he did. Anyway, the Kid moves the
“old dolls” into the casino — “played” by the big set Paramount had used in Holiday
Inn and would recycle again
for White Christmas — and
has them sleep on the gambling tables on “mattresses” that are really wrestling
mats brought from a gym (where Tor Johnson worked out as a wrestler until the
Kid roped him into being one of his bell-ringing Santas — it’s nice to see that
this weird screen presence from Ed Wood’s and Coleman Francis’ bad movies got
to be in a major-studio production with a major star, and a quite good movie at
that!). He’s bound and determined to run this scam at least until the holidays,
by which he hopes to have the money to pay Moose off — only Oxford Charlie, who
in the first half of the movie was portrayed as a nice guy deeply in love with
“Brainey” and sorry to see her only attracted to the Kid, turns into a gangster
rivaling Moose for unscrupulousness in the second half: he kidnaps Nellie and
the other “old dolls” and holds them hostage in his country home in Nyack,
keeping the racket going for his own enrichment. To stop him, the Kid dresses
in drag and crashes Charlie’s home posing as an “old doll” in need of
accommodations — only he loses the handbag he brought, which contained a gun,
and ends up with someone else’s un-armed bag. There’s a comic confrontation which
ends with both Moose and Charlie getting arrested and the Kid and “Brainey”
agreeing to tie the knot and continue running the old dolls’ home.
The Lemon
Drop Kid is a lovely movie, and
like many of Hope’s best films (the Road movies, the 1939 Some Like It Hot, and the 1949 film The Great Lover) it benefits from the sprinkling of darkness in the background that
sets off the Hope humor. It’s the kind of role that suited him best: not the
out-and-out doofus he all too often played in his later years but the sharp con
artist who’s nowhere near as sharp, or as skilled in the “con,” as he likes to
think. It’s also got two great songs — “Silver Bells,” which you know about,
and a nice novelty called “It Doesn’t Cost a Dime to Dream,” which you don’t know about but you should — and some unusual (for
a Hope movie) slapstick sequences, including one in which Hope gets the women’s
clothes he needs by stealing them, one garment at a time, off a mechanically
moving mannequin in a department-store window, in full view of a laughing crowd
and a perplexed cop. This must be one of the sequences shot by the uncredited co-director, Frank
Tashlin — the script was written by the usual committee (Edmund Beloin, Edmund
L. Hartmann, Robert O’Brien, Frank Tashlin, and “additional dialogue” by Irving
Elinson) and the credited director is Sidney Lanfield, an old Fox hack who made
something of a comeback in the 1960’s with The Addams Family TV show, but Lanfield’s skills at character comedy
and drawing-room drama did not extend to a forceful, screamingly funny
slapstick scene like this, and both this and the ending show Tashlin’s
sensibilities. The Lemon Drop Kid is also unusually good as a showpiece for Hope’s voice: though it was
hardly as beautiful an instrument as Bing Crosby’s, Hope’s voice was musical
enough to hold his own with Bing in their duets, and on his own he phrased
quite well and communicated a song effectively.
