by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Lady Scarface, a 1941 oddity from RKO that recently turned up on the Turner Classic
Movies schedule and which I thought would be an interesting counterpoint to the
two versions of Scarface Charles
and I recently watched together. (Incidentally imdb.com lists a 1928 short
called Scarface and a third
feature of that title “in development.”) It’s a film that had a lot of
potential but fell far short of what it could have been; directed by Frank
Woodruff from a script by Armand D’Usseau and Richard Collins, its main failing
is that it wanders all over the genre map. It begins with what’s by far its best sequence: James A. Pierce
(Huntley Gordon), the head of the Chicago Securities Exchange, is shown working
late at night and using the telephone — we don’t see the person he’s talking
to, or hear her voice, but it’s obvious she’s a gold-digger and he’s her
current sugar-daddy. A series of hands whose owners are unseen at first is
shown breaking into his office, and when we finally start seeing the people
full-figure it turns out that the leader of the criminal gang is a woman, Slade
(Judith Anderson, whose performance here practically defines the term
“overqualified”), who’s disguised herself as a cleaning lady to give herself an
excuse to get into the building and lead the robbery. The crooks get away with
the loot but the police, led by Chicago lieutenant Bill Mason (Dennis O’Keefe),
chase them away and the gangsters, realizing they’re “hot,” decide to leave
town, flee to New York City and mail the loot to the Leonard Sheldon Hotel in
care of Mary Jordan, the alias of a gun moll for New York gangster Lefty
Landers (Marc Lawrence). Mason intercepts the envelope with the money but
decides to let it go through anyway because it’s the only real lead he has to
trace the gang members. Mason is also locked in a love-hate relationship with
Ann Rogers (Frances Neal), a photojournalist for Snip magazine who keeps getting herself and her camera
into places where he doesn’t think she belongs. The film’s action, such as it
is, then moves to the Leonard Sheldon hotel, with just a slight detour to a
seedy old brownstone to which Mason and his New York police colleague,
Lieutenant Onslow (Damian O’Flynn, who seemed to me to be better looking and
more charismatic than O’Keefe!), have traced the gang; Slade gets away but her
lieutenant, Matt Willis (Arthur Shields, who usually got to play the cranky but
charming old Irishman parts for which they couldn’t get Barry Fitzgerald), is
shot, and as he dies Mason asks him to divulge Slade’s whereabouts. “I haven’t
the slightest idea where she is,” he says — the first clue any of the
law-enforcement characters have had that Slade is a woman, even though we’ve known that all along.
Had Lady Scarface been the film its title promised — a tough-minded
gangster tale of a woman fighting and killing her way to the top of a criminal
enterprise despite the underworld’s entrenched sexism — it would have been a
considerably better movie than it actually is. Instead it’s a weird combination
of gangster movie, Grand Hotel
knockoff, Torchy Blane-series knockoff (one of the odder conceits is that in
the opening scene, Ann has taken a photo of Mason helping Slade escape the
original robbery because he was taken in by her charwoman disguise, and rather
than do what any even remotely competent cop would do with the photo — crop
himself out of it and distribute it widely as part of the notice to be on the
lookout for Slade — he’s determined to destroy it, which he does at the end)
and loaded down with way too much
comic-relief. The film also rips off a previous RKO “B”, Wanted! Jane
Turner, particularly the preposterous
coincidence that the crooks’ package of loot intended for the fake “Mary
Jordan” is picked up by a real —
and totally innocent — woman named Mary Jordan (Mildred Coles), who’s there at
the Leonard Shelton for her honeymoon; she’s just married James Powell (Rand
Brooks, who seven years later was Marilyn Monroe’s leading man in her first
starring feature, the 1948 Columbia “B” Ladies of the Chorus) and they’re expecting money from one of his
relatives to finance their honeymoon. The comic-relief characters include hotel
detective Art Seidel (Andrew Tombes in a Tom Kennedy-type role) and Mr.
Hartford (Eric Blore, billed fifth — so the cast members of this cheesy movie
are one degree of separation from Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers and Marilyn Monroe!), who owns a pet store and keeps
bringing dogs to the Leonard Sheldon Hotel in hopes of selling them. What he
doesn’t realize is that the “dogs” referenced in the personal ads he’s
responding to are code names for the various members of Slade’s gang.
It’s
somewhat amusing that so many of the characters’ names seem to be in-joke
references to various Hollywood personnel: “Matt Willis” was an actual character
actor of the time (most famous as Bela Lugosi’s werewolf sidekick in The
Return of the Vampire), the hotel’s name is
a reversal of actor Sheldon Leonard’s moniker and Lefty Landers appears to be
an in-joke pun on “B” director Lew Landers. It’s also weird to watch Judith
Anderson’s performance; through much of it she seems confused by how much to
“dumb down” her normally cultured voice to suggest a lower-class gangster (Lady
Macbeth and Medea were more her style in villainy), but she’s still an electrifying
screen presence and one wishes we saw more of her instead of continually
cutting away from her to the boring plot lines involving the “good” characters.
The cinematographer is Nick Musuraca, who had been at RKO since the studio’s
founding in 1929 but would become best known for the dark,
chiaroscuro photography he brought to many
of RKO’s classic films noir in
the 1940’s, and his work here is as split as the movie’s plot. He brings
powerful and vivid noir
atmospherics to the scenes involving Slade and the gangsters, but everything
else gets flat, “normal” lighting — just underscoring how much this film is a
virtual compendium of greatest-hit movie clichés. About all that’s missing is a
musical number in the in-house nightclub of the Leonard Sheldon hotel — Warner
Bros. would no doubt have thrown one in but RKO didn’t budget its “B”’s for
that sort of thing. It was nice
to notice that the front of the seedy building in which the police trap (some
of) the gangsters was also used in Citizen Kane — as the “love-nest” in which Kane’s relationship to
Susan Alexander (played by Dorothy Comingore, whose husband Richard Collins
co-wrote Lady Scarface) is
exposed — and rather less nice to notice that the mistaken-identity gimmicks
that power so much of the plot (including the misconception the police labor
under through most of the film that Slade is a man) were done so much better in
the Astaire-Rogers Top Hat (also
with Eric Blore!).
