by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Alas, after RKO 281
Charles and I watched a far less interesting film: Club Paradise, a 1945 Monogram production that was originally
released under the title Sensation Hunters. In 1933 the first iteration of Monogram had released a film called Sensation
Humters that proved to be one of the unsung
masterpieces of the so-called “pre-Code” era of loose Production Code
enforcement and an important precursor of film noir. In 1948 Monogram released the 1945 Sensation
Hunters to TV under its original title, but
two years later they changed its name to Club Paradise when they put the 1933 Sensation Hunters in their TV release package as well. I briefly had
my hopes up that the 1945 Sensation Hunters was a remake of the marvelous 1933 original, but it
turned out Monogram used nothing
from the first Sensation Hunters
but the title. The 1945 Club Paradise, nèe Sensation Hunters,
starts out with its best scene — a darkly lit noir exterior shot in which a shadowy figure enters a
building and we hear two gunshots on the soundtrack but don’t see who shot whom
— and the rest of it is a surprisingly dull extended flashback (a gimmick used
by Lifetime a lot in their recent productions, and it didn’t play any better in
1945 than it does now) about nice girl Julie Rogers (Dorothy Merrick), her
boyfriend Ray Lawson (the obnoxious Eddie Quillan) — an aspiring trumpet player
in a nightclub small even by Monogram standards, whose ambition is to take his
band to a more prestigious spot and become the next Harry James — along with a
sister and brother-in-law who are staying with her insanely strict father Mark
(Byron Foulger).
Ray saves $80 towards the $320 he needs to buy a new book for
his band with which he can hopefully score a better job, but he ends up
gambling away his nut at an illegal casino which is raided. He and Julie are
arrested and told by the night-court judge, “$30 or 30 days.” The broke Ray has
to serve the 30 days; Julie is bailed out by her dad but he throws her out and
says he never wants to see her again. A desperate Julie moves into the Paradise
Club, a nightclub with living quarters upstairs — it seems the performers live
there the way nurses lived in hospitals in the 1930’s movies about them — and
eventually the hard-bitten club owner Mae (Isabel Jewell, stealing the film)
gives her a job in the club’s chorus line. Alas, Julie meets and falls in love
with no-good rotter Danny Burke (Robert Lowery, top-billed) and sticks by him
even after he disappears for long stretches, runs through a pile of money he
borrowed from a loan shark who of course turns up at the Paradise Club and
demands it … or else, and after
he romances just about every other reasonably attractive female in the cast.
There’s a scene in which one of the Paradise Club choristers is in desperate
need of medical attention after an infection turned into an emergency — it’s
obviously a botched abortion but with the Production Code in full force in 1945
that could only be obliquely hinted at — and the generous Julie helps her out.
There are also a couple of songs, one sung by Mae in an early sequence and one
by Julie towards the end, but the voice sounds so similar I suspect Monogram
could only stretch the budget to hire one singer to double for both. Ray returns to the action and turns out to
have got his band together, hired his “killer” arranger and landed a spot at
the Continental Club — a more prestigious spot than the Paradise (and Monogram
deserves credit for creating three nightclubs that look sufficiently different
from each other we can believe what we’re told about where each is on the
nightclub food chain) — only he wants Julie to sing with his band and hopefully
become his girlfriend again. Instead she catches Danny in a lie as he’s about
to run off with another woman, and shoots him. The End. Club Paradise had potential but it got pretty much squandered with
by-the-numbers acting (except for Jewell), two screenwriters (Dennis Cooper and
John Faxon) on cliché autopilot, and O.K. but uninspired direction from Christy
Cabanne, the last and least illustrious of D. W. Griffith’s four assistants on The
Birth of a Nation and Intolerance who became directors themselves. (The others were
Erich von Stroheim, Tod Browning and Raoul Walsh.) One imdb.com reviewer
compared it to Nightmare Alley, a
major-studio (20th Century-Fox) production with a major star (Tyrone
Power) made in 1947, two years later, though the Power film it was obviously
copying is Rose of Washington Square, made in 1939 and so obviously derivative of the Fanny Brice story
(with Alice Faye as the “Brice” character) that Brice sued and won an
out-of-court settlement — and though Rose of Washington Square is hardly a great movie, it’s a much better one than
this and is more effective at convincing us why that nice young woman clings so
tightly to that no-good man!
