The Strip (MGM, 1951)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Roman Polanski’s dull, ponderous attempt to re-create the classic world of film noir in Chinatown, the next item on Turner Classic Movies’ November 22 schedule was a much better film that was shown on Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” program even though it isn’t really film noir at all. It was The Strip, made by Mickey Rooney on his old stamping ground, MGM Studios, even though he’d asked for a release from his contract after Words and Music in 1948 and was then free-lancing. (For some reason, TCM cut off the studio logo usually shown at the start of MGM’s films even though a shrunken version of the logo is clearly visible on the main title card.) The Strip begins with an aerial shot of a police car speeding down the Sunset Strip at 4:30 a.m. (though it’s already daylight) while a stentorian narrator explains that because the Sunset Strip is not technically part of the City of Los Angeles, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s office has jurisdiction. The police car comes to a stop in front of an apartment building, where they find 25-year-old dancer, cigarette girl, and aspiring actress Jane Tafford (Sally Forrest) badly wounded but still alive. The sheriff’s deputies pick up Stanley Maxton (Mickey Rooney) on suspicion of having assaulted Jane, and when he references Jane’s other boyfriend, gangster Delwyn “Sonny” Johnson (James Craig, one of the many actors MGM tried out as would-be Clark Gables while the real one was fighting in World War II and didn’t know what to do with once the genuine Gable returned in 1944), and says he’d like to kill him, the sheriff’s deputies announce that Johnson was himself killed that night in his palatial beachfront home. The rest of the film is a flashback narrated by Maxton (though we don’t hear Mickey Rooney deliver a voice-over) which tells his story.

Maxton had served in the Korean War and ended up in a Veterans’ Administration hospital in Kansas City recovering from unspecified injuries, either physical or mental. (Today they’d be attributed to post-traumatic stress disorder, but MGM and screenwriter Allan Rivkin were probably well aware of the danger in stories about veterans with PTSD from the experience Raymond Chandler had put Paramount through on the 1946 film The Blue Dahlia. Chandler had wanted the killer in that film to be William Bendix’s character, severely damaged psychologically as well as physically from a brain injury he suffered in World War II, but when the Department of the Navy got word that Chandler had written that, they immediately threatened Paramount with withdrawal of their cooperation from any subsequent Paramount film – so Chandler had to write an abysmally unconvincing alternate ending.) Maxton has announced that upon discharge he intends to travel to Los Angeles and seek out a career as a jazz drummer, and to this end his buddies at the VA hospital have bought him a set of drums, which he tries out in a jam on Bob Carleton’s 1920’s song “Ja-Da.” Unfortunately, while he’s on the road to L.A. he and his car are run off the road by Sonny Johnson and his girlfriend de jour, and both the car and (more importantly for Maxton at the moment) his new drum set are totaled. No problem, Sonny insists to Maxton: he can give him a job in his enterprise, which he tells Maxton is an insurance business but it’s really a bookie joint. When the joint is raided by police (who break in through an absurdly flimsy door that looks like it was made of balsa wood). Maxton flees and gets into a car being driven by Jane. She takes him to her workplace, Fluff’s Dixie Land club on the Strip, where she introduces him to her boss, Fluff (William Demarest), who’s also its piano player. Eddie Muller said ordinarily this part would have gone to Jimmy Durante or Hoagy Carmichael, both of whom could really play piano, but Demarest had to fake it as best he could.

The house band is Louis Armstrong and His All-Stars (mistakenly billed as “Louis Armstrong and His Orchestra” in the opening credits, even though he’d broken up his big band four years before he made this movie) back when they really lived up to that name. Besides Armstrong on trumpet and vocals, they included Barney Bigard on clarinet, Jack Teagarden on trombone and vocals, Earl “Fatha” Hines on piano, Arvell Shaw on bass, and William “Cozy” Cole on drums. (For some racist reason, though MGM allowed Armstrong and Hines to show their Black faces on camera because they were stars, Shaw and Cole both had white guys doubling for them on screen. The same year MGM did the same thing to Charles Mingus, who played bass for Red Norvo’s trio in the Red Skelton/Ann Miller musical Texas Carnival, but when their number was filmed a white bassist doubled for Mingus on screen.) As luck would have it, Fluff’s previous drummer was just drafted to serve in Korea (the same war Maxton was just discharged from) and he needs a replacement in a hurry. At first glance playing drums for Louis Armstrong would seem like the sort of dream gig any musician would die for, but Maxton, who’s been working for Johnson for over a year and making twice as much money as Fluff can afford to pay him, hesitates. The next day he changes his mind and takes the gig so he can cruise Jane at Fluff’s, though Jane isn’t interested in him “that way” and tells Fluff to tell Maxton he has approval over any guy who wants to date a woman on his staff. Eventually Maxton and Jane do start dating, only she complains that what she really wants is a break to get into pictures. Maxton accordingly introduces her to Sonny, thinking he hosts enough parties for Hollywood bigwigs he can introduce her to someone who can jump-start her career. Actually Sonny has no intention of doing any such thing; he’s just stringing her along until he can get in her pants. Sonny takes Jane to such real-life clubs on Sunset Strip as Ciro’s and The Mocambo, while Maxton follows them around and is essentially stalking them.

Fortunately, along the way we get to hear a lot of great music from Armstrong and the All-Stars, including a marvelous medley of the pop-gospel song “Shadrack” (about the three Jewish men, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, who refused to worship the Babylonian gods and were threatened to be thrown into a fiery furnace by the Babylonian emperor Nebuchadnezzar in the Book of Daniel; Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego actually survived the furnace because God protected them; the song had previously been recorded by Louis Armstrong in 1938, but that version had only featured Armstrong as singer with the Lyn Murray Chorus) and the traditional song “When the Saints Go Marching In.” When my husband Charles (who came home last night in the middle of the film) and I had watched it before, I had marveled at the remarkable trombone solo Jack Teagarden played on “Shadrack” in which he didn’t move his slide at all and controlled pitch only with his lips. I had misremembered the sequence; it occurs after the band has segued into “When the Saints Go Marching In” and it lasts for just one phrase. Even so, Teagarden was famous for never pushing his slide past the fourth of the seven standard positions (according to Teagarden himself, that was because he’d learned trombone as a child, when his arms were still too short to reach past the fourth position). The big featured song from the film was “A Kiss to Build a Dream On,” which is actually introduced with William Demarest croak-singing it in a duet with Mickey Rooney (much the way the song “Silver Bells” from the movie The Lemon Drop Kid, also made in 1951, was introduced in a croak-sung version by Willliam Frawley!) and is then performed by Kay Brown as a singer at Fluff’s before Armstrong and company finally give it to us beautifully in the final scene.

After we’ve heard the story, the film cuts back to the sheriff’s station, where Maxton impulsively confesses to Sonny’s murder to save Jane from taking the fall, only he’s spared by a deathbed confession from Jane herself, who dictated her own account – she confronted Sonny at his place, they wrestled for his gun (not another “they both reached for the gun” gimmick!) and both got shot, him fatally; she managed to get back to her own apartment before she lost consciousness) – and lasted long enough to sign it before she finally expired from her wounds. It was this surprisingly downbeat ending that led Eddie Muller to call The Strip film noir even though until then there’s been nothing particularly noir about it either thematically or visually. Rivkin’s script was given serviceable direction by Laszlo Kardos (an Old Country friend of producer Joe Pasternack), though he “Anglicized” his first name to “Leslie” and that’s how he’s billed here. The Strip is quite a genre-bender, at once crime drama, whodunit, romantic comedy, and musical, with the musical elements consistently the best parts. Besides Armstrong and his All-Stars, the film features Monica Lewis, a blonde who doesn’t look at all Latina, singing a Spanish-language ballad called “La Bota,” and Vic Damone singing “Don’t Blame Me” by Jimmy McHugh (melody) and Dorothy Fields (lyrics). Vic Damone had a hit with the 1949 song “The Four Winds and the Seven Seas,” but it was also recorded by the incomparable Mel Tormé – and likewise on “Don’t Blame Me” he was competing with Sarah Vaughan’s record on Musicraft, which was far better and more sensitively phrased. I quite liked this movie even though there’s nothing truly great about it; still it worked a lot better for me than the far more highly regarded Chinatown did!