Sunday, March 10, 2019

Two Dollar Bettor (Jack M. Broder Productions, 1951)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Suburban Swingers Club I ran Charles another movie, a 1951 film from Jack Broder Productions (if he had a major-studio distributor neither the film itself nor any documentation I’ve seen on it lists one) called Two Dollar Bettor. Directed by Edward L. Cahn — who had a 30-year-long career making well-manufactured but mostly dramatically uninteresting “B”’s (though his marvelous 1955 rock ’n’ roll musical Shake, Rattle and Rock! remains interesting, less because of anything Cahn brought to it than by a witty script by Lou Rusoff that made the “moral” controversy surrounding rock in its early days the main plot issue) — from a script by Bill Raynor based on a novel by Howard Emmett Rogers, Two Dollar Bettor is also about a person who falls down the moral ladder after indulging in an obsession — this time, as the title suggests, it isn’t sex but gambling. The billing is to Steve Brodie, Marie Windsor and John Litel, in that order, but Litel actually plays the main character: John Hewitt, a widower whose two teenage daughters, Nancy (Barbara Logan) and Dee (Barbara Bestar — one wonders which one looked up when director Cahn called out, “Hey, Barbara?”), are dating guys and starting to get “serious” about them.

One day Hewitt goes out with some friends to the local horse-race track (represented by a lot of stock footage of actual races, though Cahn and his editor, Sherman Rose, are actually pretty good at integrating it into their film without the wrenching transitions between stock and new footage of some independent cheapies of the day) and at first he doesn’t want to bet on the races — but he’s finally talked into taking out a $2 bet on a 10-to-1 longshot, the horse wins, Hewitt gets $20 and his brother-in-law George Irwin (Don Shelton) tells him how much he could have made if he’d bet “real money.” Accordingly he starts going to races regularly, always betting on the horses ridden by jockey Eddie Osborne (a character we never see), and he does pretty well until Osborne is injured and has to drop out of racing for a while — whereupon Hewitt’s luck takes a major nosedive. Soon he’s in hock to a bookie whose representative, Mary Slate (Marie Windsor), meets him for lunch every Friday, at first to give him his winnings but then to collect on his losses. He cashes out his three remaining war bonds, drains his savings, and then starts embezzling — he’s the local bank’s comptroller and he has access to a safe behind his office which he seems to be able to take money out of any time he likes without anyone noticing or becoming the wiser. He ends up in hock for $14,000 but he’s sure he can make back the money and replace it before the next scheduled audit two months hence — only the owner of the bank, Carleton Adams (Walter Kingsford), whose son Philip (Robert Sherwood) is Dee Hewitt’s most serious suitor, decides to promote Hewitt to bank manager.

Alas, the price of that promotion is an immediate audit of the books in just one week — and, referencing the great W. C. Fields comedy The Bank Dick, I joked that the auditor would turn out to be Franklin Pangborn and he would bring a whole attaché case full of glasses so even if he broke a pair he could put on another and continue the audit. In a panic to get the $14,000 and replace the money he’s stolen before the audit, Hewitt flies to New Orleans to put a bet on the horse Great Day, the first to be ridden by his lucky jockey Eddie Osborne since he recovered from his injuries, and Great Day duly wins — only he’s disqualified because Osborne cheated by whipping the jockey of his horse’s principal rival on the home stretch. Then Mary Slate, whom Hewitt has formed a crush on because she’s the first woman he’s been even remotely interested in since the death of his wife, re-enters the action and tells Hewitt there are certain people with “information” on the outcome of upcoming races, and betting on their choices will be a shoo-in. She says she can arrange this with her brother Rick (Steve Brodie, who even though he’s top-billed does not appear until this movie is two-thirds over!), only we suspect it’s a sham — and director Cahn and writer Raynor nail it for us when we see Mary and her “brother” Rick locked in a passionate embrace sucking face big-time. No, Bill Raynor hasn’t gone Die Walküre on us — they’re really not brother and sister but a married couple, and their intent is to scam Hewitt out of $20,000 of his bank’s money and then flee to Mexico. Only, when the supposed “sure thing” gets scratched from the race at the last minute, Hewitt finally catches on and the movie ends with a shoot-out in Rick and Mary Slade’s apartment where Hewitt has come to get the money back, Rick reaches into his suitcase for his own gun, Rick shoots Hewitt, Hewitt shoots both Rick and Mary and ultimately all three die. To save face and protect the posthumous reputation of the man who if he’d lived would have been his son’s father-in-law, bank president Carleton Adams puts out a cover story saying that Hewitt was carrying money for legitimate bank-sanctioned purposes, Rick and Mary tried to hold him up, they shot him, he shot them in self-defense and regrettably died.

There’s nothing particularly wrong with Two Dollar Bettor but it’s all too familiar a story — Charles thought the same basic premise could have been done better at Warner Bros. in the 1930’s and I went through the whole movie wishing for a stronger actor than John Litel in the lead. And when the movie clearly turned towards the pattern of Fritz Lang’s 1946 classic Scarlet Street in the climax — particularly when Cahn copied Lang’s famous shot in which the middle-aged milquetoast hero lured by a woman into a life of crime realizes he’s been had when he sees her in an intimate embrace with her real lover — I knew who it should have been: Scarlet Street’s star, Edward G. Robinson. Two Dollar Bettor could also have used more of the film noir atmospherics Lang was so good at and Cahn couldn’t be bothered with (in 1960 Cahn did a 1920’s-set period gangster drama, The Music Box Kid — the central character was a psycho hit person for the Chicago mobs and his “music box” was his Thompson submachine gun — which had a good central performance by Ron Foster in the lead but likewise suffered from the absence of the sinister, shadowy atmosphere the story needed); instead the film just shows a basically decent man led by an addiction into a criminal world in which he was way over his head, and the cutbacks between the sleazy world John Hewitt finds himself embroiled in and the weirdly “normal” family life of his home — depicted by the swing records his daughters and their friends always seem to be dancing to in their living room every time Hewitt comes home from his latest defalcations — were obviously intended to be ironic but just come off as stultifying and enervating. Still, Two Dollar Bettor was obviously made with a basic sense of professionalism and cut to a particular set of movie conventions — as was Suburban Swingers Club — and it’s interesting to see two films about “normal” suburban people led down a primrose path in rapid succession and note both the differences in filmmaking styles and in moral attitudes between 1951 and 2019!