by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran a film from the Lew Landers tribute TCM showed a few
months ago: Fixer Dugan, which turned
out to be one of the better movies made by this usually hacky but occasionally
interesting “B” director. It also turned out to be a quite different film from
what I was expecting from the title — I had thought it would be a movie about
political corruption in 1890’s New York but instead it was a circus film, though
like most circus films it emphasized the darkness and skullduggery behind an
entertainment presented as innocent fun. As Charles pointed out later, given
the two recent headlines about circus-type performers — Karl Wallenda’s
successful tightrope walk across the Grand Canyon last Sunday, June 30 (without
the tether he was forced by ABC to wear when he walked across Niagara Falls
last year) and the death of Cirque du Soleil performer Sarah Guillot-Guyard at
a routine performance in Las Vegas Saturday, June 29 — this was odd timing to
watch a circus movie, especially one in which a performer’s fatal fall from a
high wire is a critical part of the plot! Charlie “Fixer” Dugan (Lee Tracy at
his Lee Traciest) is the general fixer for the Barwin Greater Shows circus
(greater than what, one wonders?
Those Ringling Bros., Barnum and Bailey parvenus?) and the former lover of at
least two female performers, tightrope walker Patricia O’Connell (Rita La Roy)
and lion tamer Aggie Moreno (the luminous Peggy Shannon, who’s been a favorite
of mine since I saw her in the 1933 film Deluge — which exists only in a dubbed print from Italy,
and RKO’s Italian branch for some reason got an Anna Magnani-style screamer to
dub her, creating a jarring contrast with Shannon’s aristocratic good looks).
Patricia’s daughter Terry (Virginia Weidler, in one of the ballsiest
performances ever turned in by this marvelous child star who could steal scenes
from John Barrymore and Katharine Hepburn) has been traveling with the circus
and running her own scams, charging local kids a nickel each to sneak them into
the circus — which leads Dugan to joke, bitterly, that she’s probably making
more from the show than its owner, Barvin (Bradley Page). Patricia takes
herself out of the running in the first reel when her big stunt — a tightrope
walk done blindfolded and without a net — goes horribly wrong and kills her.
Dugan and Aggie assume responsibility for Terry.
Then bad-guy circus owner
Frank Darlow (Jack Arnold, later known as Vinton Haworth) and his goon show up
claiming that, as Aggie’s former employers, they own her lions. They have a
legal document, albeit one obtained through trickery, and the only way Dugan
can save the lions is to have the circus move quickly from Missouri to Kansas,
where the paper isn’t valid. Later on, when the circus plays Missouri again,
Darlow and the thug show up again and Terry tries to warn Aggie that her lions
are about to be repo’d. With no other way to get to her — she’s in the middle
of a performance at the time — Terry sneaks into the lion cage, uses the
entrance to confront Aggie in the ring, and Aggie has the difficult task of
protecting Terry from the lions long enough for Terry to give Aggie the
warning. The audiences love the spectacle of a 10-year-old girl in the ring
with three ferocious beasts and Barvin insists that Terry become a permanent
part of Aggie’s act. Then Darlow, seeking revenge, reports Terry to the
authorities in Kansas and says a 10-year-old is performing a dangerous circus
act without permission; he files a complaint and Terry is put in an orphanage
in Marysville. Dugan and Aggie visit her by arranging a benefit performance for
the orphans — the place seems to be decently run and a far cry from the Jane
Eyre-ish hellhole movie orphanages usually
are — but, predictably, Terry runs away and wants to rejoin the circus. Darlow
and goon show up again, and this
time Dugan determines to regain legal title to Aggie’s lions by the same trick
Darlow used to cheat her out of them in the first place — only Aggie doesn’t
know that and accuses Dugan of double-crossing her. Smiley (William Edmunds),
thinking he’s doing Aggie a favor by making sure no one can have the lions if
she can’t, lets one of them loose and the lion mauls Smiley, threatens Terry and
scares the audience before Aggie finally brings him under control and the
circus warders net him and return him to the cage. Mrs. Fletcher (Edythe
Elliott), the director of the orphanage, witnesses all this — she’s been
summoned by Aggie to take Terry back — and is so impressed by the display of
courage by both Aggie and Terry that she says she’ll reconsider whether the
circus is a proper environment for her. The film ends with Dugan, Aggie and
Terry together on the road — it’s established that Terry is being home-schooled
by one of the clowns — and amazingly for a Code-era film there’s no indication
that Dugan and Aggie were obliged to get married before they could adopt Terry.
Fixer Dugan was written by Bert
Granet (future RKO producer) and Paul Yawitz from a 1928 play called What’s
a Fixer For? by future film director H. C.
Potter, and according to the American Film Institute Catalog RKO started this project under the same title as the
play and planned for Chester Morris to play Dugan (his would, I suspect, have
been a considerably darker reading than Tracy’s) and male child actor Donnie Dunagan to play Terry (which
explains the gender-ambiguous name and Virginia Weidler’s androgynous
appearance in the role) — though Weidler was the absolutely right person for it
at the time, a welcome breath of fresh air given that virtually all other child
stars of both genders were then being pressed into the rancidly sappy-sweet
mold of Shirley Temple. It’s one of those studio-era products that isn’t a
particularly ambitious movie but works on all cylinders, a fun romp in which
virtually everything is done right and we can forgive the clichéd situations
because they’re at least used in a challenging and entertaining way. Lee
Tracy’s act can get pretty obnoxious at times but he’s perfectly cast here, and
though Peggy Shannon was the Lindsay Lohan of her day — she drank herself to an
early death at 34, just two years after making this film — she’s in marvelous
form here. Ironically her birthplace was Pine Bluff, Arkansas — also the home
town of blues legend Bukka White.
