Saturday, November 9, 2024

Angels Over Broadway (Columbia, 1940)


by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

From an old movie journal entry, dated February 6, 2007.

The film I wanted to see was one of those quasi-legendary movies I’ve been reading about for years but had never had a chance to watch before: Angels Over Broadway, a surprisingly dark 1940 film about gangsters, hustlers, desperate would-be entertainers and, at its center, a plot by the three titular characters to raise $3,000 to save an embezzler who’s been caught by his boss but not yet reported to the police from committing suicide. The film was written, directed and produced by Ben Hecht — one of his few directorial efforts — and starred Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. (in yet another role that cried out for James Cagney, though I must say that while he was fundamentally miscast and way too nice as a personality for the hard-bitten what’s-in-it-for-me hustler he was supposed to be playing, Hecht directed him effectively and got him to deliver the Hecht wisecracks in an appropriately guttural manner) as Bill O’Brien, desperate Broadway hustler looking for his “seven,” a big score that will put a small fortune in his pocket when at the moment he’s got only $7 to his name. The movie opens with O’Brien’s voiceover as he waits in the rain for a sucker that will make his fortune, and he thinks he’s found him in Charles Engle (John Qualen) when Engle arrives at the “Pigeon Club” — an awesomely decorated nightspot with a phone booth that looks like a Plexiglas candy cane and a backdrop of silhouettes of skyscrapers mounted at such askew angles (from the floor and from each other) that one gets the impression either the establishment or the film itself could have been called The Nightclub of Dr. Caligari. (Hecht’s penchant for really obvious and simplistic symbolism is shown in the name of the place, in which just about everyone — the owner, the staff, the customers — is there either to fleece or get fleeced.)

Only we’ve already seen Engle write a suicide note that says he’s broke and owes $3,000 to his company — specifically his mentor and business partner, Joseph Hopper (George Watts, a singularly repulsive-looking actor — he comes off as Edward Arnold just after a three-day bender — and an utterly right casting choice) — and Hopper gives us the backstory (he fell for and married an exploitative woman, who ditched him for the man she really loved and took the company’s $3,000 that Engle had stolen for her with him) and sends Engle off in search of his wife, her lover and, most importantly from his point of view, the missing money. By this point we’re probably assuming that, since Rita Hayworth is featured prominently in the credits (she’s billed second), she’s going to be playing the no-good wife and the Fairbanks character will turn out either to be the lover or someone tracking the lover down from his own interest in Rita. Instead, the wife and the lover never appear as characters, and Engle shows up at the Pigeon Club, throwing what little money he has around wildly, including buying a pack of cigarettes from a cigarette girl with a $20 bill and telling her to keep the change (“He didn’t even look at me!” she says, amazed). He also meets former ballet dancer Nina Barone (Hayworth, still with her original raven-colored hair and low Latina hairline), who protests that she can’t get a job because “I’m Russian [though later it develops that she was really born in Brooklyn] and everything is Latin now” (yet another Hecht touch: specifically making a plot point about Hayworth’s character not being Latina when in fact she herself was).

She’s reached so far down that when she finally spots the Pigeon Club’s entertainment director, Mr. Hugo (Fred Sweeney), and he offers her a dinner date that makes it unmistakably clear that sex with him will be a precondition for any consideration of employment (clearer than we’d expect in a post-strict Production Code enforcement film; it’s the sort of nervy gag we’re used to seeing in early-1930’s movies but not in something this relatively late), she’s willing to accept, and only O’Brien appearing on the scene and telling Hugo that Nina has a husband (which she doesn’t) keeps her from sacrificing her virtue for a job. Angels Over Broadway then introduces us to the third “angel,” playwright Eugene Gibbons (Thomas Mitchell) — we were obviously supposed to be thinking Eugene O’Neill here, especially when it develops that eight years before Gibbons won the Pulitzer Prize for drama and now he’s an alcoholic wreck, his last three plays have flopped and he’s hanging around the Pigeon Club vainly trying to woo back his soon-to-be ex-wife Sylvia (Constance Worth) from her new boy-toy Stevie (Richard Bond). Gibbons learns of Engle’s plight when he’s mistakenly given Engle’s coat and, in the process of trying to fit himself into it, discovers the suicide letter. O’Brien has planned to steer Engle into a crooked poker game and take him for all the money he has, and when he learns that Engle is really as broke as he is, he, Nina and Gibbons decide to get him into the game anyway, have him sit there for the few hands the gangsters will let him win as a come-on, and then get him out of there at least $5,000 to the good — $3,000 to pay off Hopper and the other $2,000 for O’Brien’s cut. (This takes place after Gibbons steals a $12,000 jewel he once gave his wife off her person — only to learn from her that it was just a $10 paste replica. It’s that kind of movie.)

Angels Over Broadway has its flaws, including a surprisingly stagy structure — Hecht had been in Hollywood for 13 years by then but he still thought in terms of stage-play structure, and the film has a clearly defined prologue (in the rain) and three acts (at the Pigeon Club, the theatre where Gibbons’ last flop play was performed — and a giant papier-maché mountain adds an unusual and intriguing backdrop to the scene — and the final act at the grungy hotel where the crooked poker game is taking place) — and an atrociously clichéd “happy” ending that suddenly and sentimentally reunites O’Brien and Nina at the fade after Hecht has carefully established that they really have nothing in common and no reason to end up together. (I can only guess that Hecht had his tongue firmly in his cheek when he typed out the last page or two, knowing how false he was being to his entire story concept just to get the romantic ending audiences presumably wanted.) But on the whole it’s quite good, and indeed in its overall frankness about human behavior and the venal motives that really drive people (at least the people Ben Hecht was fond of writing about; he’d have been a lousy choice to write a Mother Teresa biopic but his overall cynicism made him first-rate as a writer about cynics) make it seem more like a movie from the early 1970’s than one from 1940 — and so, as my husband Charles pointed out when I mentioned that to him during the film, does the immense and sometimes oppressive amount of psychoanalyzing the characters do of each other and themselves while they’re waiting for things to happen.

It’s also a marvelous film from the visual standpoint; though Hecht’s title card lists him as writer, director and producer, a subsequent card lists cinematographer Lee Garmes as his co-director as well (a function Garmes had also served on three of the four films Hecht and his frequent writing partner, Charles MacArthur, had at least nominally directed at Paramount’s Astoria studio in New York in 1934-35, among them Crime Without Passion, a movie I saw in the early 1970’s, remember as absolutely superb and would dearly love to be able to see again), and as with Citizen Kane a year later (where Orson Welles put Gregg Toland’s cinematography credit on the same card as his directorial credit, and where the accounts of how the film was made leave the impression that Toland was virtually its co-director), one gets the impression that Garmes’ function not only went considerably farther than the norm for a director of photography but that some of the shots he suggested to Hecht, including some night exteriors where the camera placement gives real New York buildings (or at least the simulacra of same conjured up by Columbia’s art department) the same vertiginous angles as the silhouettes in the backdrops at the Pigeon Club, as well as an overhead shot of the poker game that gives the players the kaleidoscopic form of a Busby Berkeley chorus line. Sometimes Garmes’ work comes off as pointless visual virtuosity, but mostly it adds piquance to an already spicy story (in more than one sense; the sexual frankness of Hecht’s script is one of the strongest points of this film and one can only wonder how he got some of those lines and situations past the Production Code censors) and a movie that, except for that really tacky ending, seems about 30 years ahead of its time.

Not surprisingly, it was a commercial flop; Columbia studio head Harry Cohn ordered it re-edited to try to warm it up a little, and Hecht responded by saying if it were released that way he’d call for a credit title that would read, “Written, Directed and Produced by Ben Hecht and Ruined by Harry Cohn.” (Cohn got the message and released the film in Hecht’s cut.) Its failure was a minor blip in the way of Rita Hayworth’s rise to stardom — fortunately, a year later (with her new auburn-colored hair and raised “Anglo” hairline), Hayworth made two back-to-back extravangazae at other studios, The Strawberry Blonde at Warners and Rouben Mamoulian’s stunningly colored Blood and Sand at Fox, and those sent her into superstar orbit — but was probably the reason why Hecht didn’t get to follow Preston Sturges, Billy Wilder and John Huston into full-time directorship, more’s the pity; Angels Over Broadway is a great film (albeit one hobbled by Hecht’s corrosive cynicism — there isn’t anyone in this film you actually like, another aspect which makes it well ahead of its time) and one which deserves to be better known.