by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After Suburban Swingers Club I ran Charles another movie, a 1951 film from Jack Broder Productions
(if he had a major-studio distributor neither the film itself nor any
documentation I’ve seen on it lists one) called Two Dollar Bettor. Directed by Edward L. Cahn — who had a 30-year-long
career making well-manufactured but mostly dramatically uninteresting “B”’s
(though his marvelous 1955 rock ’n’ roll musical Shake, Rattle and
Rock! remains interesting, less because of
anything Cahn brought to it than by a witty script by Lou Rusoff that made the
“moral” controversy surrounding rock in its early days the main plot issue) —
from a script by Bill Raynor based on a novel by Howard Emmett Rogers, Two
Dollar Bettor is also about a person who
falls down the moral ladder after indulging in an obsession — this time, as the
title suggests, it isn’t sex but gambling. The billing is to Steve Brodie,
Marie Windsor and John Litel, in that order, but Litel actually plays the main
character: John Hewitt, a widower whose two teenage daughters, Nancy (Barbara
Logan) and Dee (Barbara Bestar — one wonders which one looked up when director
Cahn called out, “Hey, Barbara?”), are dating guys and starting to get
“serious” about them.
One day Hewitt goes out with some friends to the local
horse-race track (represented by a lot of stock footage of actual races, though Cahn and his editor, Sherman
Rose, are actually pretty good at integrating it into their film without the
wrenching transitions between stock and new footage of some independent
cheapies of the day) and at first he doesn’t want to bet on the races — but
he’s finally talked into taking out a $2 bet on a 10-to-1 longshot, the horse
wins, Hewitt gets $20 and his brother-in-law George Irwin (Don Shelton) tells
him how much he could have made if he’d bet “real money.” Accordingly he starts
going to races regularly, always betting on the horses ridden by jockey Eddie
Osborne (a character we never see), and he does pretty well until Osborne is
injured and has to drop out of racing for a while — whereupon Hewitt’s luck
takes a major nosedive. Soon he’s in hock to a bookie whose representative,
Mary Slate (Marie Windsor), meets him for lunch every Friday, at first to give
him his winnings but then to collect on his losses. He cashes out his three
remaining war bonds, drains his savings, and then starts embezzling — he’s the
local bank’s comptroller and he has access to a safe behind his office which he
seems to be able to take money out of any time he likes without anyone noticing
or becoming the wiser. He ends up in hock for $14,000 but he’s sure he can make
back the money and replace it before the next scheduled audit two months hence
— only the owner of the bank, Carleton Adams (Walter Kingsford), whose son
Philip (Robert Sherwood) is Dee Hewitt’s most serious suitor, decides to
promote Hewitt to bank manager.
Alas, the price of that promotion is an
immediate audit of the books in just one week — and, referencing the great W.
C. Fields comedy The Bank Dick, I
joked that the auditor would turn out to be Franklin Pangborn and he would
bring a whole attaché case full of glasses so even if he broke a pair he could
put on another and continue the audit. In a panic to get the $14,000 and
replace the money he’s stolen before the audit, Hewitt flies to New Orleans to
put a bet on the horse Great Day, the first to be ridden by his lucky jockey
Eddie Osborne since he recovered from his injuries, and Great Day duly wins —
only he’s disqualified because Osborne cheated by whipping the jockey of his
horse’s principal rival on the home stretch. Then Mary Slate, whom Hewitt has
formed a crush on because she’s the first woman he’s been even remotely
interested in since the death of his wife, re-enters the action and tells
Hewitt there are certain people with “information” on the outcome of upcoming
races, and betting on their choices will be a shoo-in. She says she can arrange
this with her brother Rick (Steve Brodie, who even though he’s top-billed does
not appear until this movie is two-thirds over!), only we suspect it’s a sham —
and director Cahn and writer Raynor nail it for us when we see Mary and her
“brother” Rick locked in a passionate embrace sucking face big-time. No, Bill
Raynor hasn’t gone Die Walküre on
us — they’re really not brother and sister but a married couple, and their
intent is to scam Hewitt out of $20,000 of his bank’s money and then flee to
Mexico. Only, when the supposed “sure thing” gets scratched from the race at
the last minute, Hewitt finally
catches on and the movie ends with a shoot-out in Rick and Mary Slade’s
apartment where Hewitt has come to get the money back, Rick reaches into his
suitcase for his own gun, Rick shoots Hewitt, Hewitt shoots both Rick and Mary
and ultimately all three die. To save face and protect the posthumous
reputation of the man who if he’d lived would have been his son’s
father-in-law, bank president Carleton Adams puts out a cover story saying that
Hewitt was carrying money for legitimate bank-sanctioned purposes, Rick and
Mary tried to hold him up, they shot him, he shot them in self-defense and
regrettably died.
There’s nothing particularly wrong with Two Dollar Bettor but it’s all too familiar a story — Charles thought
the same basic premise could have been done better at Warner Bros. in the
1930’s and I went through the whole movie wishing for a stronger actor than
John Litel in the lead. And when the movie clearly turned towards the pattern
of Fritz Lang’s 1946 classic Scarlet Street in the climax — particularly when Cahn copied Lang’s
famous shot in which the middle-aged milquetoast hero lured by a woman into a
life of crime realizes he’s been had when he sees her in an intimate embrace
with her real lover — I knew who it should have been: Scarlet Street’s star, Edward G. Robinson. Two Dollar
Bettor could also have used more of the film
noir atmospherics Lang was so good at and
Cahn couldn’t be bothered with (in 1960 Cahn did a 1920’s-set period gangster
drama, The Music Box Kid — the
central character was a psycho hit person for the Chicago mobs and his “music
box” was his Thompson submachine gun — which had a good central performance by
Ron Foster in the lead but likewise suffered from the absence of the sinister,
shadowy atmosphere the story needed); instead the film just shows a basically
decent man led by an addiction into a criminal world in which he was way over his head, and the cutbacks between the sleazy
world John Hewitt finds himself embroiled in and the weirdly “normal” family
life of his home — depicted by the swing records his daughters and their
friends always seem to be dancing to in their living room every time Hewitt
comes home from his latest defalcations — were obviously intended to be ironic
but just come off as stultifying and enervating. Still, Two Dollar
Bettor was obviously made with a basic
sense of professionalism and cut to a particular set of movie conventions — as
was Suburban Swingers Club — and
it’s interesting to see two films about “normal” suburban people led down a
primrose path in rapid succession and note both the differences in filmmaking
styles and in moral attitudes between 1951 and 2019!
