by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Our “feature” last night was a flawed but oddly compelling
drama from Paramount in 1936, I’d Give My Life, produced by Richard Rowland (who owned the rights personally and
co-produced with the studio rather than selling them) and directed by Edwin L.
Marin, based on a 1926 stage play called The Noose by H. H. Van Loan and Willard Mack. Rowland had
previously filmed it at First National in 1928 (just before Warner Bros.
absorbed that company) with Richard Barthelmess and Montagu Love as the male
leads, and Barbara Stanwyck had used its climactic scene — the central
character’s girlfriend pleading with the state governor to give him a
last-minute reprieve from his scheduled execution; or, failing that, at least
to give her his body so she can give him a proper disposition — for a screen
test at Paramount to determine if she should be hired to repeat the role she’d
played on stage in the musical Burlesque. The “suits” at Paramount decided not to hire her for that part —
instead they changed the title to The Dance of Life and gave the part to Nancy Carroll because she’d
made films before and therefore had a movie “name” — but Frank Capra saw the
test and hired her to star in Ladies of Leisure at Columbia, a blockbuster hit which put Stanwyck on
the “A”-list overnight. I’d Give My Life has a weirdly assorted cast list — the top-billed actor is Sir Guy Standing
as John Bancroft, the governor of the state where the film takes place, and
most of the other cast members are either solid character actors or people with
virtually no latter-day reputations at all. At the start we see a young man
named Nickie Elkins (Tom Brown, actually a personable presence with an acting
style somewhere between Chester Morris and James Cagney) flying his own plane
with his girlfriend, singer Mary Reyburn (Frances Drake), at his side. They
buzz a commercial airliner (with the TWA initials on its fuselage — it’s always a surprise to see an actual brand name of anything in a 1930’s movie!) carrying the wife of the
governor Stella (Janet Beecher) and the governor’s mother (Helen Lowell), and
with press photographers waiting to greet the governor’s family Nickie gets his
picture taken with them after he retrieves Stella’s hat (it’s blown away in the
backwash from a plane’s propeller) and returns it to her.
Then the film cuts to
the governor’s office, where he’s meeting with the media to tell them that he’s
going to keep all the promises he made in his recent campaign to clean up the
state and get rid of its criminal syndicates. Afterwards we see Buck Gordon (a
marvelously slimy performance by Robert Glecker) breeze past the governor’s secretary
and crash his office without an appointment, and the reporters assume that
because Gordon is the biggest crook in the state, all Governor Bancroft’s
promises to clean things up are so much hogwash. Once they’re alone together,
the governor tells Gordon to his face that he’s going to put him out of
business, and Gordon darkly warns that if he tries it, it’ll be the governor
who’ll sorry. We’re left in suspense as to just what Gordon thinks he has on Governor Bancroft that
will derail his good-government crusade, and then the scene shifts to the Club
Gordon, the flagship of Gordon’s enterprises, an above-board nightclub with a
secret “members only” back room that’s really a betting parlor — only instead
of running a to-live-outside-the-law-you-must-be-honest bookie joint Gordon has
the clocks in his back room set far enough behind so he can take bets on races
that have already happened, and have his staff talk down the horses that
actually finished in the money and get the suckers to bet on the also-rans.
(One of the episodes of the 1950’s TV show Racket Squad used the same gimmick, though with home recording
having developed far beyond what it had been in the 1930’s the bad guys in that
one actually recorded the radio
broadcasts of the real races and played them for the suckers on tape-delay.)
Mary sings at the Club Gordon — though she seems to know only one song,
“Someday We’ll Meet Again” by Con Conrad and Herb Magidson (two otherwise
infinitesimally-known songwriters who racked up the first Academy Award for
Best Song in 1934 for “The Continental” from the Astaire-Rogers musical The
Gay Divorcée) — and though Nickie seems at
first to be just an innocent and naïve young man, it turns out he’s an enforcer
for Gordon’s mob and has been ever since Gordon plucked him out of reform
school and hired him.
Nickie has no idea what his life was like before reform school — he’s been told he was an orphan
living alone when he got into trouble — until the big reveal happens: in order
to keep Nickie in line after Gordon has ordered him to kill someone (he was
supposed to take a jockey who’d won a race Gordon had ordered him to throw up
in his plane and push him out in mid-air) and Nickie, whatever he’s done
before, draws the line at murder, Gordon tells Nickie that he’s actually
Nickie’s biological father — and his mom is Stella Bancroft, the seemingly
ultra-respectable wife of the governor. What Gordon has been holding in reserve
to break Governor Bancroft if his anti-rackets campaign got too close is the
revelation that the governor’s wife had a child before her marriage — and that
Gordon himself is the father. Only Gordon and Nickie have one of those infamous
they-both-reached-for-the-gun scenes, and it ends with Gordon dead and Nickie
arrested for murder. He pleads guilty and is sentenced to death (at least in
the modern era, it seems odd that his attorney, who looks reasonably competent,
couldn’t plea-bargain his sentence down to life in prison), and while everyone
from the trial judge to his own attorney to the prosecutor to the governor
insists that the only way he can get leniency is if he explains why he killed Gordon, he’s determined to die at the
gallows rather than give away his secret. After Mary pleads with the governor
to spare the life of her boyfriend, whom she’s still convinced is innocent, he
says the law must take its course and Nickie must die on schedule. Then, the
morning Nickie is supposed to die, the governor finds that the hotline phone
with which he communicates with the prison has been moved, and when he calls
the warden he finds that someone has already called in a reprieve on his behalf
— and even though he didn’t authorize it, the law is that once a reprieve has
been ordered the state has to wait at least 30 days to reschedule the
execution. The governor summons Nickie to his office and Nickie reluctantly
gives Stella a letter he had written her, revealing the secret, that was only
supposed to be opened after he was executed. In a last-ditch attempt to keep
what’s left of Gordon’s enterprises open, the crook who took over the nightclub
(ya remember the nightclub?)
after Gordon’s murder calls the governor and reveals Nickie’s identity, but the
movie ends with everyone the wiser, forgiveness reigning and the governor
promising not only to cancel Nickie’s execution but to lobby his pardon board
for a full pardon for him.
I’d Give My Life is a frustrating movie because the central premise
is compelling and riveting — one could readily imagine it being remade today
with only a modicum of tweaking and updating — and despite the no-name cast,
the acting is generally credible and sometimes more than that. The young leads
are especially powerful; one wonders why on the basis of this performance
Paramount didn’t give Tom Brown a
buildup as their Cagney, and though Frances Drake almost certainly never saw
Barbara Stanwyck’s test scene from this story, her performance is surprisingly
Stanwyckesque — the tremulous voice, seemingly on the verge of breaking into
emotional hysteria without quite going over; the similarly controlled
movements, about ready to explode but not quite doing so — while her singing
voice is hauntingly similar to Connee Boswell’s even though the song she’s
stuck with is surprisingly undistinguished. (There’s an oddly deceptive credit
in that Con Conrad and Herb Magidson are credited with “songs,” but in fact
there’s only one song in the film.) The problem with the movie is the stagy
script by George O’Neil, with “additional dialogue” by Ben Ryan — even if you
didn’t know from the credits that this was based on a play, you could guess it;
and while the actors speak normally and don’t … adopt … the maddening …
pause-ridden … style of … acting common in the earliest talkies, in other
respects this really seems more like a film from 1929 than 1936. Edwin L. Marin
was a maddeningly uneven director — his best films, A Study in
Scarlet and A Christmas Carol, both had their inspiration in major British
authors’ works and had Reginald Owen as their star — here he occasionally
creates a genuinely chilling and atmospheric image (notably when Mary is
obliged to sing That Song in the nightclub on the eve of Nickie’s execution,
and she throws the music away — and Marin and cinematographer Ira Morgan shoot
her through the bars on her music stand, evoking the prison bars that are
enclosing her boyfriend; five years later John Huston would use a similar shot
to end The Maltese Falcon), but
for the most part his direction is plodding and undistinguished. A story that
could have used the full film noir
treatment (granted that 1936 was a little early for noir, but William Wellman, Charles Vidor and Fritz Lang
had all made U.S. films that basically qualified) doesn’t get it; instead we
get scene after scene of flatly lit, stagily composed tableaux and little more
than standard shot-reverse shot editing — and we can’t help but wish this could
have been made at Warners, with the real James Cagney and Barbara Stanwyck in the leads and Michael Curtiz
directing!
