by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film Charles and I watched last night was I’ve Got
Your Number, a snappy little 67-minute
Warners “B” from 1934 (the last year of the so-called “pre-Code” era, which
showed in quite a few plot points and bits of “business”) centered around the
telephone business and how important it had become in American life even though
in 1934 there were still people with living memories of a time without phones
and quite a few rural areas of the country where phone service was either
spotty or nonexistent. It begins with a marvelous montage sequence showing
various uses to which people put their phones, from a stockbroker using it to
make what would now be called day trades to a woman placing a call to a married
woman friend of hers to warn her that her husband is on his way home
unexpectedly early, but fortunately the back door out of their bedroom still
works. (Charles not surprisingly groaned at that one.) Then we meet our principals: Terry Reilly (Pat
O’Brien) and his assistant John (Allen Jenkins — one of the kinkiest “pre-Code”
aspects of this movie is Jenkins’ weirdly homoerotic tones as he upbraids Terry
for being too interested in women), repair people for the phone company; Marie
Lawson (Joan Blondell), a switchboard operator at the Hotel Eden (I made a bad
joke about someone calling the Hotel Eden to ask them to page Adam and Eve, and
Charles responded, “Cain’t do it — we’re not Abel!” I said, “I’m sorry, but we
can’t get in touch with Cain either — he’s Nodding out,” and the jokes
fortunately stopped before they got even worse); and Bonnie (Glenda Farrell
— I recorded this off a Turner Classic Movies “Summer Under the Stars”
tribute day to her, even though she’s only in two scenes), a phony psychic who
gets busted when Terry and John catch her using her phone lines to broadcast
fake messages from the dead to the customers at her séance. Why she relied on
her phone lines instead of installing her own sound system remains a mystery —
the writers, William Rankin (story) and Sidney Sutherland and Warren Duff
(script), never explain it — but Terry and John use it as a pretext to rip out
both her phone lines. However, John, despite his previous “women — yuck”
attitude, is smitten with Bonnie and they pair off — as to Terry and Molly, who
have one of those hate-at-first-sight that blossoms into love relationships
that abounded in 1930’s movies.
Marie gets fired when she’s tricked into
playing what she thinks is a practical joke on a customer — re-routing a call
he’s expecting into another room — only it’s a plot to rip him off, the hotel
blames her and she loses her job. Terry talks a rich friend of his into
offering her a job at his company — and Marie is tricked again by the boyfriend of a girlfriend of hers, with the
result that her sponsor, John Schuyler (Henry O’Neill), loses $90,000 in
negotiable bonds to the crook and naturally blames Marie as having been in on
the theft. Terry is convinced of her innocence and agrees to meet her, not
knowing that the cops have put him
under surveillance as a way of finding and arresting her — and when she’s
pinched she accuses him of double-crossing her. But Terry and John get the
evidence to free her by illegally wiretapping the crooks’ phone line — Terry
from the crooks’ hideout (where they catch him and hold him) and John back at
the phone company’s headquarters — and John rallies the rest of the phone
company’s repair people, they crash the crooks’ hideout, rescue Terry and hold
the crooks until the police can come and arrest them. Directed by one of
Warners’ hackiest contractees, Ray Enright, I’ve Got Your Number is saved by the cleverness of the montage sequences
(indeed the opening reel is probably better than the whole rest of the movie!),
the nicely drawn (if predictable) antagonism between Terry and his immediate
supervisor, Joe Flood (Eugene Pallette), and above all by a strong performance
by Blondell in her best world-weary mold — even though the film lacks the
fireworks of the movies in which Blondell and Farrell actually worked as a team
and lit sparks off each other. As for Pat O’Brien, this may be one of the most
actively unpleasant roles he ever
played; though he softens at the end (when he’s alone with Blondell on their
wedding night and the other phone guys crash their bedroom as a practical
joke), for the most part he’s so nasty and unscrupulous throughout the movie
you rather dread that he and that
nice girl are going to end up together at the end.
I’ve Got Your
Number is actually a quite good example of
Warners’ “proletarian” movies, the sort of film they specialized in about
everyday working-class occupations other studios, particularly MGM and
Paramount, generally considered themselves and their audiences “above” — and as
I’ve pointed out before, that’s largely due to where the theatres owned by the
big studios were located. Paramount’s and Loew’s (MGM’s parent company)
theatres were in the most affluent areas of the major cities, and therefore
those studios made films that would appeal to the upper and upper-middle
classes. Warners, flush with the success of Al Jolson’s early sound vehicles The
Jazz Singer and The Singing Fool (the last, a 1928 release, was the highest-grossing
movie ever until Gone
With the Wind 11 years later), bought the
First National company, a group of theatre owners that had formed their own
studio in 1918 to make sure they could get star product — and as a result, from
1928 on, Warners had large numbers of theatres in working-class and rural areas
Paramount and Loew’s hadn’t felt were worth serving, and therefore needed to
make films about people like those in their audiences — even though Jack Warner
was able to parlay the money he made on his gangster films, working-class
stories and musicals (where he mashed up the elitist fantasies of Busby
Berkeley’s production numbers with the proletarian stories of piss-poor
performers desperately trying to get along until their shows opened and
hopefully became hits) into the remarkable run of mid-1930’s movies that
established Warner Bros. once and for all as a first-tier major: Madame
DuBarry, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Anthony Adverse, The Green Pastures, The
Story of Louis Pasteur and Warners’ first
Academy Award Best Picture winner, The Life of Émile Zola.
