Blood Money (20th Century Pictures, United Artists, 1933)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Rowland Brown’s second film as director was Hell’s Highway, based on a script he didn’t write and made at RKO in a hurry to beat Warner Bros.’ much-ballyhooed drama I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang with a similar story. For his third film, Blood Money, he went back to writing his own script and made a truly great film, rich with social comment on the network of ostensibly “legitimate” but secretly corrupt citizens who sustain the crooks. He made this one for Twentieth Century Pictures, the studio founded by former Warner Bros. production head Darryl F. Zanuck and United Artists president Joseph Schenck in 1933, which would merge with the Fox Film Corporation two years later to form 20th Century-Fox, with Schenck quitting his U.A. job and becoming the president of 20th Century-Fox instead. The star is George Bancroft, who had been started on a star buildup at MGM until Louis B. Mayer got disgusted with his efforts to organize actors and other movie personnel into unions and fired him. He plays Bill Bailey, a bail bondsman in Los Angeles who has built up a network of associates, some of them out-and-out crooks and some outwardly respectable but willing to help him for shares in his ill-gotten gains or favors, like getting their scapegrace children out of jams with the police.

Like Bugs Raymond in Quick Millions, Bailey has an ongoing relationship with a class-peer partner, Ruby Darling (played by Judith Anderson, better known for his stage work in plays by Euripedes and Shakespeare; this was her first feature film, and she wouldn’t make another for seven years until her unforgettable portrayal of Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca, but in 1941 she’d play a gangster herself in a forgettable RKO “B” called Lady Scarface) but lusts after an upper-class woman, Elaine Talbart (Frances Dee). Elaine is the kleptomaniac daughter of the fabulously wealthy Marcus Talbert (Frederick Burton), who crosses Bailey’s path when she steals an expensive jeweled ring from a department store, then comes to Bailey for bail in case she’s arrested – which she isn’t because Bailey arranges with a contact at the store’s insurance company for them to cover the loss, no questions asked. Ruby appears to be running a nightclub in her living room at which the featured performer is vaudeville star Blossom Seeley, playing herself and coming off here as sort of the beta version of Mae West; she’s blonde, stout, wears dresses that look more like the 1890’s than the 1930’s, and beits out a ribald song called “Old San Francisco Bay” (according to imdb.com it was actually written by Gertrude Hoffman and Vincent Bryan in 1906, obviously a year in which San Francisco was in the news big-time!) and the old nightclub standard “My Melancholy Baby.”

What’s most interesting about Blood Money is the extent to which Brown further pushed the envelopes he’d already started to tear in Quick Millions: the cinematography (by James Van Trees) is even more oblique (it’s one of those films in which director and cinematographer seem determined to show they can get more out of an overhead camera than just shooting Busby Berkeley-style musical numbers!) and proto-noir. Though he probably did relatively little original composition – much of the score is pre-existing songs, notably “Frankie and Johnny” (which Brown had also used in Quick Millions and makes a major theme here (leading us to expect that Bailey will meet his comeuppance when Ruby decides to kill him out of jealousy) – musical director Alfred Newman creates a nice aural tapestry that adds to the excitement and tension. And Blood Money is, if anything, even more explicit about the class tensions between the gangsters and the so-called “legitimate” people who depend on scumbags like Bailey to keep them out of trouble and from having to account for their actions on the wrong side of the law. At one point Bailey says he knows quite a lot of rich people who steal from stores just for the thrill of doing so – and don’t suffer the consequences because their husbands or families have charge accounts at those stores and tell the store management to just put it on their bill. In another quite remarkable scene Bailey sends out a minion in the early hours of the morning to crash the home of a judge whose signature he needs to get his latest client out of jail. The henchman sprinkles drops of black ink on the judge’s pristine white sheets before he wakes the judge to get him to sign the warrant – and then we hear a woman’s voice. The judge wasn’t alone: he was in bed with his wife and she makes it clear she’s getting really tired of Bailey sending his people home and waking them in the middle of the night just to get his warrants signed.

Bailey himself is an ambiguous character, a sort of lovable rogue whose butch charms so attract Dorothy that she tells him, “I want a man who’s my master; who isn’t afraid of anybody in the world; who’d shoot the first man that looked at me.” Dee’s character seems to be attracted to Bancroft’s out of his sheer butchness – much the way Norma Shearer was to Clark Gable in another fish-out-of-water drama about a gangster trying to crash polite society, A Free Soul, two years earlier. There’s an intrigue in which Bailey helps out a young man from Dorothy’s social circle and thereby arouses Ruby’s jealousy – as I said, just from the constant repetition of “Frankie and Johnny” on the soundtrack we’re led to believe she’s going to kill him at the end the way Frankie killed Johnny “because he done her wrong” – and Ruby does indeed devise a highly unusual murder plot against Bailey. Knowing that Bailey is a big pool buff – he was shown playing the game in an early scene that “plants” the idea à la Chekhov’s pistol – she commissions a bomb-maker to create an explosive pool ball that will go off when another ball strikes it – and of course it’s the 8-ball that her bomb-maker wires up that way.

This is a premise Brown borrowed from, of all people, Buster Keaton, who in 1924 had had his detective hero “Sherlock, Jr.” (actually a surrealistic character literally dreamed up by the milquetoast movie projectionist he plays in the establishing scenes) playing a game of pool in which, unbeknownst to him, one of the pool balls contains a bomb. Ruby has just sent over the bomb ball and instructed her minion to leave the game just before Bailey has to sink the 8-ball – they’re playing “rotation pool,” a variant in which the balls have to be sunk in numerical order – and Brown constructs a great double suspense sequence in which Bailey keeps sinking ball after ball until he gets the 7-ball while Ruby, who’s decided once she learned the guy Bailey was trying to help had been framed that she doesn’t want Bailey to die after all, races through the city (it’s specifically set in Los Angeles as well as shot there) and bribes her cab driver to ignore the lights in hopes she’ll get there in time to grab the deadly pool ball in time to save him. She makes it and grabs the ball from the table, he tests it by throwing it out the window at an empty building and it duly explodes, and the shock (in both senses) brings Bailey and Ruby together for what Brown clearly intended us to read as a happy ending. Blood Money is a quite remarkable movie, rich in proto-noir compositions that reflect the darkness of Brown’s vision and in particular how the so-called “legitimate” world is locked into a cynical but mutually beneficial embrace with organized crime.

Brown would face quite a few obstacles and would never again direct a film start-to-finish. He was hired to direct The Scarlet Pimpernel in Britain in 1934 by Alexander Korda, but he was fired before the shooting started and replaced by Harold Young (whose lame work is the main reason that movie is far less fun than it should have been). He was briefly attached to the 1937 version of A Star Is Born (he’d been one of the writers on the prototype, 1932’s What Price Hollywood?) but William Wellman replaced him. In 1936 he was hired by MGM to direct his own script The Devil Is a Sissy, starring Freddie Barthomew and Mickey Rooney in yet another story of the clash between the upper classes and the criminal classes, but he was fired in mid-shoot and replaced by one of MGM’s all-purpose relief directors, Woody Van Dyke. Articles at the time claimed that only about one or two of Brown’s scenes remain in the movie, but I think considerably more of The Devil Is a Sissy as it stands is Brown’s work. Not only does Brown’s footage look proto-noir but the performances he gets out of the actors – especially Rooney – are quite different. Brown, seemingly alone of all the directors who ever had to deal with Mickey Rooney, actually got him to underact, while Van Dyke let him chew the scenery like all his other directors did.

Then Brown got an assignment from Grand National Pictures to write and direct a film for James Cagney (who quite frankly would have been a better leading man for either Quick Millions or Blood Money than those films’ actual stars) during the period when Cagney had won his freedom from his Warner Bros. contract in court. Brown came up with a script called Angels with Dirty Faces about two juvenile criminals, one of whom got away, reformed and became a priest while the other got arrested, put in “reform school” (1930’s audiences immediately registered the irony that so-called “reform schools” never actually reformed anybody: quite the contrary) and ultimately became a gangster. Then Warner Bros. won back Cagney’s contract on appeal and, without a star for Angels with Dirty Faces, Grand National sold the script to Warners – who put their own writer (John Wexley) and director (Michael Curtiz) on it. The result was one of Cagney’s biggest hits and best-remembered films, but it didn’t help Rowland Brown any and for the remaining two decades of his career he was just a story writer.