It Happened on Fifth Avenue (Roy Del Ruth Productions, Allied Artists, 1947)

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

Last night (Saturday, December 21) Turner Classic Movies continued its week-long marathon of Christmas films, of which I watched four. Two were movies of which I’ve long been familiar: The Man Who Came to Dinner (1941) (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2023/12/the-man-who-came-to-dinner-warner-bros.html) and We’re No Angels (1955) (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2023/12/were-no-angels-paramount-1955.html). The other two were a movie I’ve long been curious about and one I’d never heard of before last night. The movie I’d long been curious about was It Happened on Fifth Avenue, which had a rather convoluted production history. It was originally developed by Frank Capra for his short-lived independent production company, Liberty Films, but he placed it in turnaround when Charles Koerner, studio head at RKO (which had agreed to distribute Liberty’s productions), offered him It’s a Wonderful Life instead. It was picked up by “B” studio Monogram, whose head, Steve Broidy, had ambitions to build a major company the way Harry Cohn had done with Columbia. To this end, he founded a new label, “Allied Artists” (an obvious knockoff of United Artists), and bought It Happened on Fifth Avenue as its first film. Broidy hired writers Everett Freeman and Vick Wright to flesh out the original story by Herbert Clyde Lewis and Flash Gordon serial producer Frederick Stephani into a script, and he picked Roy Del Ruth to direct. It Happened on Fifth Avenue centers around a professional squatter, Aloysius T. McKeever (Victor Moore), who sneaks into the homes of wealthy New Yorkers who have gone south for the winter and helps himself to their food, clothing and shelter.

The home he’s targeted this year is that of super-industrialist Michael J. O’Connor (Charlie Ruggles in a part for which Capra would almost certainly have cast Edward Arnold), the second richest man in the world, who’s buying up land parcels right and left to build a combination airport, truck terminal and commercial development in the heart of New York City. One of the places he’s bought for this mega-project is a hotel where World War II veteran Jim Bullock (Don DeFore) is the last remaining tenant, the others having already moved out on cue following the eviction orders given by the executive O’Connor has put in charge of the project, Farrow (Grant Mitchell). When he’s finally thrown out on the street, Jim meets McKeever, who invites him to move into the O’Connor mansion and join him as a squatter. Meanwhile, O’Connor’s daughter Trudy (Gale Storm) runs away from the boarding school in which her divorced parents Michael and Mary (Ann Harding) have put her and lets herself into her dad’s New York home, Though she has a key, McKeever and Jim immediately assume she’s a down-on-her-luck squatter just like they are. Jim and Trudy inevitably fall in love, but there’s a big problem in that Jim hates Michael O’Connor and blames him for being homeless. Trudy hits on a plan: she talks her dad into posing as another homeless person and moving in to his own house, allegedly as a squatter, so he can meet her nice young boyfriend and get to know and like him. There’s another plot strand in that Jim and his fellow housing-challenged war veterans are pooling their allotment money to buy an old disused army barracks and turn it into veterans’ housing, only the land it sits on is yet another parcel O’Connor has earmarked for his big development. There are some quite charming scenes in which O’Connor tries to sneak time on the house’s telephone so he can call Farrow and his other executives to tell them how to run the company in his absence, and McKeever overhears them and thinks “Mike” (the only name O’Connor has given him) is a poor person expressing the delusion that he’s rich.

Del Ruth and the writers also put O’Connor through the traumatic experience of essentially being turned into a servant in his own house, forced to do dishes and sleep in the basement (in a bed that collapses bit by bit as he tries to sleep in it, a set of gags that would no doubt have come naturally to Capra, with his experience as a gag man for Mack Sennett and Hal Roach). Complications arise when O’Connor’s ex-wife Mary decides to pose as a homeless person herself and joins the household as a cook. O’Connor and his ex realize that they’re still in love with each other – she only broke up with him because, like Ebenezer Scrooge’s girlfriend Belle, she’d decided he loved money more than her. We also learn that the O’Connors didn’t start out rich: they initially had no money and worked up from a railroad flat (a sort of apartment common in New York City where the living space is so narrow all the rooms are in line with each other and you can get from one to another only via a long hallway) to a fortune. O’Connor is reminded of his early days as a poor man when he smells the slumgullion stew his wife used to make for him when they had little money. Eventually O’Connor’s company outbids Jim’s veterans for the old Army camp and O’Connor tells Farrow to offer Jim a job at $12,000 per year in Bolivia just to get him out of the country and away from Trudy. There’s a surreal scene in which the vets literally occupy the place and throw rotten fruit at Farrow when he comes in to lead a crew to evict them and tear down the barracks they wanted to rebuild as civilian housing. By this time O’Connor has got in touch with his old values enough that he joins in the riot, eagerly throwing fruit at his own representative, and I’m surprised Del Ruth and the writers didn’t pull the obvious gag of having Farrow recognize O’Connor and wonder just why his boss was throwing fruit at him for following his orders.

Ultimately O’Connor secretly invites Jim and two of his fellow veterans to a meeting at his office, where he startles them by turning out to be the tramp they’ve been living with all this time. O’Connor donates the barracks property to Jim and company, and now that the winter is over McKeever makes plans to journey to O’Connor’s winter home in Virginia and spend his summer there. It Happened on Fifth Avenue isn’t a great movie, and the spectre of what Frank Capra could have done with this plot hangs over it – especially since Capra would almost certainly have cast it better. For one thing, he’d probably have used Thomas Mitchell as McKeever instead of the offensively whiny Victor Moore – one watches Moore’s movies and wonder how on earth he became a star. His best-known film is probably Swing Time with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, and he did his level best to ruin it but Astaire, Rogers and Jerome Kern’s great songs proved too much for him. And, as I mentioned above, Capra would probably have cast Edward Arnold as O’Connor instead of Charlie Ruggles, who was a fine character comedian but just doesn’t have the sheer power as an actor to convince us that he’s a super-tycoon whose word can make or break people. Roy Del Ruth pulled one major boner as a director; instead of letting Gale Storm do her own singing (this film has so many songs it practically qualifies as a musical), he insisted on hiring Joyce Terry as her voice double. When Storm offered to audition for him to prove she could sing herself, Del Ruth refused to let her. I’ve long thought Gale Storm’s career was one of the great might-have-beens in Hollywood history: she had a pleasant face, a winsome personality and a good voice, and had she signed with a major studio instead of Monogram she could well have had the sort of career Doris Day did. Overall, though, It Happened on Fifth Avenue is a nice, charming film, predictable in its plot resolution and very much to the Capra mold even though he didn’t direct it, but it’s entertaining and Del Ruth did manage to keep Victor Moore’s whininess under a certain degree of control.