Mr. Soft Touch (Columbia, 1949)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After the Sister Boniface Mysteries episode I watched a truly weird movie on Turner Classic Movies’ “Noir Alley” series, a 1949 film from Columbia called Mr. Soft Touch, the sixth and last film to co-star Glenn Ford and Evelyn Keyes. The film was co-directed by Gordon Douglas and Henry Levin, and judging from their previous credits Eddie Muller guessed that Douglas did the film’s big action set-pieces and Levin shot the rest of the film. Muller’s intro discussed the constant sexual harassment and threats Keyes faced at the hands of Columbia studio president Harry Cohn, who was essentially the Harvey Weinstein of his time/ Like Weimstein, Cohn regarded every reasonably attractive woman he employed as fodder for his lust, and Keyes was one of his prime targets. As a result of her turning down his advances, Cohn determined to ruin Keyes’ career, and for this movie he deliberately toned down her blonde good looks and cast her as Jenny Jones, the rather mousy leader of the Borden Street Settlement House in San Francisco, to which Joe Miracle (Glenn Ford) is essentially sentenced by a judge whose wife is a big supproter of the mission. Joe was once the co-owner of the River Club casino with a partner named Leo Christopher, only while he was off fighting the Germans in World War II the Mob decided to take over the casino, forced Leo to sell to him, and ultimately killed him and buried his body under a construction site. Joe holds up the River Club, though he insists he’s only taking back the money he’s legally owed for the forced sale, and when the film opens he’s trying to maneuver his way past the toll booths at the Golden Gate Bridge. The toll then was only 25¢, but they demanded exact change – and the toll was still that amount when I grew up in the 1960’s, and they were still insisting on exact payment.

Joe escapes both the mobsters and the cops by deliberately crashing his (stolen) car, parking it in a car lot and stealing another one. He makes his way to the home of Victor Christoper (Ray Mayer), his late partner’s brother, and Victor’s wife Clara (Angela Clarke). Victor is a wanna-be composer who gets off on ringing a hand bell at night, thereby keeping his neighbors awake, and he also beats his wife, though we’re clearly meant to believe that’s an understandable eccentricity instead of a loathsome aspect of his character. Joe poses as Victor when he’s arrested, not for sticking up a casino but disturbing the peace with his bell, and he actually pleads with the cops to put him in jail for a night until the ship on which he’s booked passage sails for Yokohama. (He’s going there because it was the destination of the next passenger liner that was scheduled to depart from San Francisco.) Instead of jail, however, Joe is remanded to the custody of Jenny Jones at the mission and he keeps hitting on her, much to her irritation because he’s posing as a married man even though he isn’t. There are a bunch of oddballs at the mission, including a pack of Dead End Kids wanna-bes whom Joe takes for the fund to buy a Christmas tree, and a loon played by Percy Kilbride who keeps orating incessantly bout what’s woring with the world and how he proposes to fix it.

One of the most interesting aspects of Mr. Soft Touch is it was made a year before the smash success of the 1950 Broadway musical Guys and Dolls, yet its plot is strikingly similar: both involve a gambler and a missionary who fall for each other, and the plot takes another turn into Damon Runyon territory when Joe is helped in the final sequence by no fewer than five people dressed as Santa Claus (yes, this is, among other things, a Christmas movie, though for some reason Columbia released it it August 1949 instead of holding it back until December) much the way a similar squad of Santas bais out Bob Hope as the title character of the Runyon-based The Lemon Drop Kid in 1951, two years later. In the end the mobsters not only ambush Joe and shoot him three times in the back, they also set fire to the mission after they find out that Joe has hidden the money they were trying to recover in the doll of one of the girls at the mission. The film’s finale shows Jenny leading the mission’s Christmas party in the burned-out hulk of its building under a big sign on which the word “Vacation” has been crossed out of the slogan “Vacation Fund” and “Building” has been written in.

Apparently the film’s original ending was that Joe would die from the Mob hit people’s wounds, but someone at Columbia decided at the last minute that this would be too downbeat an ending for what is basically a light-hearted romantic comedy with just a few hints of noir. In both his intro and his outro, Eddie Muller attributed the film’s character to its writer, Milton Holmes, who in 1943 had made his breakthrough into the film business by selling RKO the script for Mr. Lucky, which starred Cary Grant as a gambler and Laraine Day as the decent woman who reforms him. Holmes would return to this plot line again and again in films like Johnny O’Clock (1947), directed by Robert Rossen and starring Dick Powell as the gambler and Evelyn Keyes (again) as the decent woman who redeems him,, and Boots Malone (1952), with William Holden as the gambler and Ann Lee, billed ninth, as the woman. In Mr. Soft Touch Holmes wrote only the “original” story – Orin Jannings wrote the actual screenplay – but the trademarks of Holmes’ writing style are clear, including the oddball names he gave his male leads: Miracle, O’Clock, Boots. It occurred to me while watching Mr. Soft Touch that Dick Powell might have been a better choice for the male lead than Glenn Ford – Powell was better able to play world-weariness; when Ford tries it, he just looks angry – but as it stands, Mr. Soft Touch is an oddball movie that stands or falls (sometimes both in the same scene!) on its sheer quirkiness.