by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Two nights ago Charles and I screened one of the movies I’d
recorded on a recent Turner Classic Movies tribute to actor Lee Tracy, a 1937
RKO “B” called Criminal Lawyer. It’s
impossible for me to think (or write) about Tracy without recalling how he literally pissed away a major career; in 1934, on location in
Mexico for MGM’s big-budget biopic ¡Viva Villa! (with Wallace Beery as Pancho Villa and Tracy as his
gringo press agent responsible
for getting him and his revolution good publicity in U.S. papers), he stood on
the balcony of his hotel room one day and urinated on a passing detachment of
soldiers in the Mexican army. This antic got not only Tracy but the entire film
crew thrown out of Mexico immediately, and MGM got back by firing not only
Tracy but director Howard Hawks, replacing him with Jack Conway (who got sole
screen credit even though between two-thirds and three-fourths of the released
film is Hawks’ work) and the Mexican locations with whatever places they could
find in alta California that
looked more or less right. Tracy drifted through the studio food chain, ending
up at RKO and then an even cheaper (but still semi-major) lot, Universal, doing
cheaper movies designed to show off his fast-talking wise-guy persona. Criminal Lawyer is listed on imdb.com as a remake of a 1932 film
called State’s Attorney (with
John Barrymore, of all people, as the character Tracy plays here) — in 1951 RKO
would make another “B” called Criminal
Lawyer that would have certain plot devices
in common with this one but wasn’t really a remake — and is actually a
crackling-tough little melodrama which casts Tracy as attorney Barry Brandon,
who wins his cases with spectacular courtroom stunts and, it’s hinted (but not
officially revealed until the end), bribing jurors.
His main client is gangster
Gene Larkin (Eduardo Ciannelli), and while running an illegal casino in New
York City is a bit of a comedown for this actor after he played a character
(based on Charles “Lucky” Luciano) who was running the entire New York Mafia in
Marked Woman the year before,
he’s nonetheless sinister enough that we applaud when Brandon, as a weird
practical joke, arranges for the casino to be raided. He gets everyone off in
night court with a $50 fine, which Larkin agrees to cover for everyone even
though this sets him back over $2,000 and he’s naturally pissed at Brandon for
costing him that much money. Incidentally, the night court judge is a woman
(Claire McDowell) — there may have been an earlier one, but offhand this is the
first film I’ve seen that shows a woman judge — and Brandon stays on to watch
her hear her next case. This involves Madge Carter (Margot Grahame), a “woman
of the streets” — it’s ambiguous in that maddening Production Code way exactly what she’s accused of doing, but whatever it is it
involves picking up a man, Jack “Fingy” Doremus (Francis McDonald), who
Brandon, taking Madge’s case on the spot as a lark, establishes is a paid
police informer who’d swear out a complaint against anybody for the fees the cops are paying him. Brandon takes
Madge home and installs her in an apartment in his building — chastely, of
course, this being a post-Legion of Decency strict-Code-enforcement era film —
while still continuing his relationship with Betty Walker (Betty Lawford),
daughter of political boss William Walker (Frank M. Thomas). Larkin and Walter père have hatched a plot to get Brandon appointed as an
assistant district attorney, and then move him up to full D.A. when Walker’s
political machine gets the current D.A. elected to the U.S. Senate — only
Brandon warns Larkin that if he expects this will give him a free pass from
prosecution, he’s mistaken. While I took your money I was on your side, Brandon
tells Larkin, but if I’m going to be paid by the people of New York to prosecute
criminals, then I’m going to prosecute them — and that means you. Accordingly
he aggressively pursues Larkin’s criminal enterprises and also wins a
spectacular conviction against Nora James (Lita Chevret), who murdered her
husband after she reviously tried to hire Brandon to help her divorce him and
he refused on the rather hypocritically “virtuous” ground that he never did
divorce work and regarded the marriage bond as sacred.
With Madge Carter
working in his office as a secretary and personal assistant, Brandon expects to
stay in the good graces of Walker’s political machine long enough to get
elected governor — only one night, after a drunken crawl through various
nightclubs and parties, Betty Walker steers the drunken Brandon to a justice of
the peace and marries him. (Usually in the movies it was the guy who got the girl drunk so she’d agree to a
“marriage” she wouldn’t have consented to sober.) The shock of realizing that
Betty tricked him into marrying her convinces Brandon that it was Madge he really
loved anyway, but now that he’s a married man she wants nothing to do with him
either professionally or personally. She quits Brandon and goes to Larkin, of
all people, to cash Brandon’s severance check — maybe her final get-back at him
was supposed to be to give Larkin the check and therefore a hold over Brandon
that would destroy him, but writers Louis Stevens (story), G. V. Atwater and
Thomas Lennon (script) don’t make that clear — and as she leaves Larkin’s she
sees him go out and shoot his gangland enemy “Bird Dog” Finn (probably William
A. Williams, since he’s the only actor imdb.com lists for this movie without a
character name). Then Larkin kidnaps her and forces her to testify at his trial
that he shot Finn in self-defense after Finn pulled a gun on him — only Brandon
destroys Larkin’s self-defense claim by revealing that Finn was shot in the
back. Brandon gets Madge to admit that she was forced to perjure himself, and
in a climax that seems more like a 1960’s movie than a 1930’s one he confesses
to jury tampering and other forms of complicity in Larkin’s crimes, announces
he’s stepping down as D.A. and giving up his law license, and he and Madge
(like William Powell and Myrna Loy at the end of Manhattan Melodrama three years earlier) walk out of the courtroom arm
in arm to heaven knows what.
Criminal Lawyer is a well-made film (the director is former D. W.
Griffith assistant Christy Cabanne, who didn’t have anywhere nearly as
distinguished a career as Erich von Stroheim, Tod Browning or Raoul Walsh but did work a long time and make some entertaining films,
as well as total crap like the 1947 Bela Lugosi stupidity Scared to
Death; according to both the American
Film Institute Catalog and imdb.com,
however, Edward Killy filled in briefly while Cabanne was ill) and Margot
Grahame gives a performance that should have marked her for biggers and
betters, but didn’t. If there’s a fault in it, it’s Lee Tracy, who as in his
other films plays a character whose sheer energy is entertaining but is utterly
unable to make us like him; he’s
great in the scenes where Barry Brandon is an unscrupulous shyster but he’s
utterly unable to convince us that he’s having a crisis of conscience. Lee
Tracy was a superficially similar “type” to James Cagney — they were both short,
highly energetic Irish wiseguys — but the depths Cagney could sound even within
the limits of the stereotyped gangsters and con men Warners kept casting him as
were completely beyond Tracy, and to a modern audience the surprise is not that
Tracy so stupidly blew his chances at a major career but that he got as close
to one as he did in the first place.
