Afterwards Charles and I watched an oddball download from archive.org: The Wrong Road, which I had assumed from the title would be a 1950’s juvenile delinquency movie. Surprise! It was actually issued in 1937 by the then-new Republic Pictures and had a director who had once been part of the “A”-list, James Cruze, who had inexplicably fallen from grace. Cruze had started out as an actor at the Thanhouser studio, for whom he had produced, directed and played the title role(s) in the very first film adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. By 1923 he was a big enough filmmaking “name” that Paramount assigned him to direct The Covered Wagon, the first epic-length Western and a blockbuster hit that inspired imitators (including The Iron Horse, directed at Fox by the young and then little-known John Ford). Cruze followed up the enormous success of The Covered Wagon with similarly big “historicals,” including The Pony Express and Old Ironsides, as well as directing Howard Hughes’ last silent film, The Mating Call (1928), a quite good melodrama about returning World War I veterans who run afoul of a Ku Klux Klan-like organization in the small town to which they return following the war. (James Cruze made a movie for Howard Hughes in 1928; 10 years later he made the first version of Herbert Asbury’s book Gangs of New York, which was remade by Martin Scorsese — who also made The Aviator, a biopic of Howard Hughes.) Cruze seemed to have survived the transition from silent to sound films well enough — his first talkie was an elaborate production for a new studio called Sono Art-World Wide, The Great Gabbo (1929), which featured Erich von Stroheim as a crazy ventriloquist in love with his woman assistant. Alas, 1929 was exactly the wrong year to launch a new movie company — it limped along for four years until finally expiring in 1933 — and Cruze’s career in the 1930’s took an odd path.
He still got jobs directing major productions with top-tier stars, including the quite good 1933 film I Cover the Waterfront (based on San Diego journalist Max Miller’s column of that name, though like Cruze’s later version of Gangs of New York it had little to do plot-wise with its source) with Claudette Colbert and Ben Lyon (and an extraordinary scene between them in which, visiting a museum of sailing-ship history, he puts her in stocks and then kisses her, something she’d been unwilling to let him do sans bondage); the Will Rogers vehicle David Harum in 1934; and Sutter’s Gold, a big production that had originally been planned for Sergei Eisenstein during his brief period (1930-31) as a contractee at Paramount. It was supposed to be the story of John Sutter, whose discovery of gold on his ranch in upstate California started the California gold rush in 1849 and led ultimately, ironically, to Sutter’s financial ruin — only by the time it was shot Paramount had put the project in turnaround, Universal had picked it up (and cast Edward Arnold as Sutter), and the resulting film was a mega-flop. Cruze packed up and made his next (and last) four films at Republic: The Wrong Road, Prison Nurse, Gangs of New York and Come On, Leathernecks! Based on a story by Gordon Rigby, which he turned into a script along with Eric Taylor, The Wrong Road is an odd tale in which two old friends from the upper class, Jimmy Caldwell (Richard Cromwell) and Ruth Holden (Helen Mack), return home from college and find that both his and her parents have lost all their money. Unable to support themselves in the lifestyle to which they have become accustomed, Jimmy hits on the idea of embezzling $100,000 from the bank where he works and giving it to Ruth, who in turn hides it in an antique music box and sends it to her Uncle Mike, an antiques dealer in Chicago. The plan is they’ll admit to stealing the money and will get two-year sentences, after which they’ll be released and be able to pick up the money.
Only they run afoul of Mike Roberts (Lionel Atwill), agent of the International Surety company which insured the bank Jimmy worked at and stole the money from, and he’s so determined to recover it he makes Javert from Les Misérables look like a slacker by comparison. Mike becomes the criminal couple’s nemesis, following them and offering them the chance to avoid legal jeopardy if they’ll just tell him where the money is, then after they’re arrested arranging for them to be paroled in order to lead him to the stolen cash. (One would think an agent for International Surety would have more cases to worry about than just this one.) It’s nice to see Lionel Atwill as a good guy for a change — though he did a good guy even better in the 1944 film Lady in the Death House, one of the few genuinely good films made by PRC — but what’s frustrating about this movie, aside from the wimpy actors playing it (Cromwell is basically an animated tailor’s dummy and Mack, who was so good in Son of Kong and some of her other credits, can’t summon much expression until the very end, when she manages a Stanwyckian tremulousness that suggests Stanwyck herself would have been better casting — though the real problem with this film’s casting is the male lead, which cries out for Henry Fonda[1] and gets Richard Cromwell), is how stupid the leads are. It’s hard to work up much sympathy for their plight when they not only got themselves into this pickle in the first place but kept resisting Roberts’ best efforts to get them out of it again. They ultimately get paroled and head to Chicago, where Uncle Mike’s antique shop is — or rather was, since he just died, he was deeply in debt, and his assets, including that music box, were seized by his creditors and are being sold at auction that day. They tried to bid for the music box but lose it to a ridiculously queeny collector, Victor J. Holbrook (Rex Evans), who in turn sends it to a relative of his, Martha Foster, who runs a combination motel and farm in Sunnydale. (Charles noted at the bizarre range of this film’s geography: it seems to start in New York, moves to Chicago and ends in Sunnydale, which appears to be in California.)
Martha Foster is played by the great Marjorie Main, and once she appears the film’s energy level and overall appeal zooms several ticks upward. Alas, our stupid leads are tracked to her farm not only by Mike Roberts but also by Blackie Clayton (Horace MacMahon), a hardened criminal who was Jimmy’s cellmate in prison and who became determined first to horn in for a one-third share of Jimmy’s loot and then to demand all of it. In the end Blackie confronts Jimmy just as they’ve stolen the music box that contains the loot, they struggle for the gun (Maurine Watkins, your plagiarism attorney thanks you again!), Jimmy kills Blackie, the two lovebirds finally have enough sense to give the money to Roberts, and they end up in a clinch. The Wrong Road is a bizarre movie because so much of it works — it has Cruze’s beautiful visual sense and great supporting performances by Atwill and Main — but at the same time it just seems unbelievable either that the two leads could be so stupid or that they eventually escape only a bit scathed by the two years in prison each had to spend, which gave them a feeling, regularly expressed in the Rigby-Taylor script, that they “earned” the money. (There’s also the minor detail that in the scene in the bank early on where Jimmy, a teller, passes Ruth the cash, it doesn’t look anywhere nearly large enough to be $100,000. Were we supposed to believe he gave it to her in installments, stealing a little bit at a time until they had $100,000? And if that’s so, wouldn’t he have been caught long before he was?) The Wrong Road is a stylishly directed melodrama but all Cruze’s finely honed instincts for striking visuals can’t overcome a fundamentally silly script and a pair of downright irritating actors in the leads.
[1] — Fonda had played strikingly similar characters in
Fritz Lang’s 1937 masterpiece You Only Live Once and John Brahm’s 1939 ripoff of it, Let Us Live.
