I got up and watched a movie on Turner Classic Movies, Bullets or Ballots, a 1936 vehicle for Edward G. Robinson (playing “Johnny Blake,” a New York police detective who went undercover to infiltrate the rackets and smash them — based on a real-life detective named Johnny Broderick who did the same thing), directed by William Keighley (whose last name I had no idea how to pronounce until I heard a broadcast recording of a Lux Radio Theatre he hosted and the announcer introduced him by pronouncing his last name “Keeley”) and co-starring Joan Blondell (as the white girl who, according to the version of history contained in this script by Seton Miller and Martin Mooney, actually invented the numbers racket — which she ran while performing as a singer in a cabaret; it looks like Miller and/or Mooney had been to see Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps) and Humphrey Bogart (as a trigger-happy thug who commits the only on-screen murders and is the one person in the gang who actually catches on to the fact that Robinson is really an undercover cop). It’s a measure of what Warner Brothers thought of Bogart at the time that he’s billed fourth — after Robinson, Blondell and Barton MacLane as the CEO of the rackets (he takes his orders from the mysterious “big guys” above him — who turn out to be the directors of the Oceanic Bank, moonlighting in crime on the side!) — ironic to anyone who’s seen The Maltese Falcon, made five years later with Bogart top-billed and MacLane way down in the cast list as one of the two police officers who harass Sam Spade. Robinson remembers this one in his autobiography as the movie whose smashing success enabled him to negotiate a super-contract with Warners that gave him the money to pay for his burgeoning art collection — aside from that, it’s a tight-knit Warners melodrama (I’ve always admired the simplicity of the solution they came up with when the Robinson and Cagney gangster pictures were criticized by the Legion of Decency — keep using these actors in crime stories but just switch them to the right side of the law!) that illustrates the truth of the joke both Robinson and Bogart made about how in the 1930’s, when Robinson was a star and Bogart a supporting player, Bogart had to die in the next-to-last reel and Robinson died in the last reel; later, in the 1940’s, it was Robinson who had to die and Bogart got to live!— 4/2/98
•••••
The night before I’d run the film I recorded on the same
disc as Little Caesar: Bullets or Ballots,
a film Robinson made six years later, after the Legion of Decency and the Production
Code crackdown and after Jack Warner and Hal Wallis responded to the criticisms
of films like Little Caesar and The
Public Enemy for allegedly “glorifying”
crime by taking their stars, Robinson and James Cagney, and putting them in
crime films where they played people on the right side of the law: Cagney as an FBI agent in G-Men and Robinson, in Bullets or Ballots, as New York police detective Johnny Blake (based on
real-life cop Johnny Broderick), who ostensibly gets himself “fired” from the
force and seemingly switches sides to hire on to the gang led by Al Kruger
(Barton MacLane) and “Bugs” Fenner (Humphrey Bogart). Only, as we suspect all
along and the film soon tells us, it’s a ruse: by being cashiered out of the
police force so spectacularly and publicly (after throwing a fake punch at the
new police commissioner at a public cabaret owned by a gangland associate), he
seeks to convince the gangsters that he’s burned his bridges with the police so
he’ll be more believable when he claims he’s changed sides. (Warners used this
plot gimmick quite a few times since, including at least two World War II
melodramas: Across the Pacific,
directed by John Huston and starring Humphrey Bogart in his subsequent good-guy
career; and Desperate Journey,
with Errol Flynn.)
Blake also has a quirky relationship with Lee Morgan (Joan
Blondell) — and yes, it is
jarring to see a white female character with the same name as a subsequently
famous Black male jazz trumpeter — who owns the cabaret where he mock-punched
out the police commissioner and who also took over the numbers racket from her
Black maid, Nellie LaFleur (Louise Beavers) — where there seems to be some
degree of mutual attraction (though, as in Little Caesar, none of the gangsters seem to have any romantic or sexual
relationships) — only to have her control of it threatened in turn by Kruger
and Fenner. In any event, Bullets or Ballots is a surprisingly dull film, ineptly directed by
William Keighley (a far cry from the rapid, energetic direction Mervyn LeRoy
brought to Little Caesar, including
some oblique camera angles and a few shots with ceilings over a decade before
Orson Welles supposedly became the first director to show ceilings in Citizen
Kane) and decently but not especially
thrillingly scripted by Seton I. Miller from a story co-written by Miller and
Martin Mooney, a Chicago crime reporter who once went to jail rather than
identify his sources (as Richard Serrano and Judith Miller would later) and who
achieved sufficient fame for that stand that the original trailer for Bullets
or Ballots actually advertised the film as
“Written by Martin Mooney — The Man Who Wouldn’t Talk!” The best part of the
film is its ending, a two-person shoot-out between Robinson and Bogart in which
they mortally wound each other (thereby dispatching Johnny Blake more
permanently than his real-life counterpart, Johnny Broderick, who lived long
enough to write a book about his experiences) and a quite engaging death scene
for Robinson on the floor of Morgan’s cabaret in which he and the police
commissioner forgive each other — it’s nowhere near as powerful as the “Mother
of mercy, is this the end of Rico?” line at the end of Little Caesar but it’s still well written and well acted by
Robinson, who remembered Bullets or Ballots as the movie that was such an enormous hit that he
was able to renegotiate his Warners contract for much more money and the right of story and script approval, as well as
an “out” clause allowing him to make one film a year elsewhere. — 1/19/09
•••••
I flipped around the channels last night and came upon most
of the 1936 movie Bullets or Ballots,
based on a story by Martin Mooney — a former crime reporter who’d gone to jail
rather than reveal the sources for his stories on the rackets, a fact Warner
Bros. exploited in publicizing this film: the original trailer read, “Written
by Martin Mooney, the man who wouldn’t talk!” The film was directed by William
Keighley (pronounced “Keeley,” by the way) from a script by Mooney and Seton I.
Miller (who later, as producer as well as writer, bedeviled Fritz Lang on Ministry
of Fear) and starred Edward G. Robinson as
“Johnny Blake,” a New York police detective who spends years attempting to bust
the big rackets ostensibly headed by Al Kruger (Barton MacLane) but really run by three ostensibly respectable bankers who
operate it from the board room of the Oceanic Bank and Trust Company. (I joked,
“A lot of their loans are underwater,” and Charles joked back, “Yeah, but
they’re really good at floating bond issues.”) Things start to unravel for the
gang when Kruger’s lieutenant, “Bugs” Fenner (Humphrey Bogart in one of his standard-issue
gangster roles of the period — he’s an emotionless killing machine — about
which Bogart himself joked to friends that he could write all his dialogue on
3” x 5” cards because he said the same lines in every movie and all that
changed was the order in which he
had to say them), kills an investigative reporter who’s trying to expose the
gang. The authorities bring in a special prosecutor who calls together a grand
jury and has it meet in secret so the gang can’t infiltrate or corrupt it, and
the prosecutor hires New York police officer Joe McLaren (Joseph King) to head
the enforcement operation — a job McLaren takes on condition that he doesn’t
have to answer to anyone or report to anybody about what he’s doing or why.
Johnny Blake gets into
a public confrontation with McLaren and gets fired from the police force, then
takes a job with Kruger working for the gangsters he used to try to arrest
(sort of like Rudolph Giuliani), only “Bugs” Fenner is suspicious of him from
the get-go and warns his fellow gangsters that Blake may be an undercover
police agent. Fenner is absolutely right, of course; there’s a scene in which
Blake, driving Kruger’s car, gets a parking ticket and beats up the
horse-mounted cop who wrote it, then gets busted and held in a solitary cell —
only it’s already occupied by McLaren, who’s chosen this ultra-secure location
to get Blake’s reports. The prosecutors and police bust racket after racket and
Kruger, with the usual stupidity of a Barton MacLane character, refuses to
believe that he’s brought this on himself by hiring an ex-cop. Desperate for a
new source of income, the racketeers determine to take over the numbers game,
which in this version of history was invented by Nellie LaFleur (Louise
Beavers), the Black maid of Lee Morgan (Joan Blondell), who has a legitimate
business running a nightclub as a front for her criminal activities. The
casting of Blondell as a crook is unusual and decidedly off the beaten path for
a Warner Bros. movie, though she’s also a throwback to the good-bad gangsters
of late-1920’s and early-1930’s movies like Underworld and The Doorway to Hell in that she’s not only Blake’s sort-of girlfriend
but she has characteristics of decency and nobility — she’s really the only
multidimensional character in this story. One of the good things about Bullets
or Ballots (a title that’s never really
explained — there’s nothing like the awkwardly patched-in scene in the 1932 Scarface in which the audience is told that ultimately they’re the ones keeping the gangs in business by continuing
to vote for corrupt politicians instead of reformers) is that it shows a
surprisingly business-like arrangement in the gang’s secret headquarters, where
money is taken in, counted and accounted for just like a legitimate business —
a scene that may have been influenced by the depiction of the racket’s secret
operation in Fritz Lang’s 1928 German film Spies.
Another is the epochal confrontation between the
Robinson and Bogart characters at the end, in which their characters kill each
other but Blake lasts long enough to finger the secret heads of the gang to the
police before he expires. (Robinson takes so long to die this became one of
those movies about which I joked, “I’ve seen operas that had less extended death scenes than this!”) Bullets
or Ballots was based on the exploits of
real-life New York undercover cop Johnny Broderick, who unlike his movie
counterpart lasted long enough to give a series of newspaper interviews about
his activities which Warner Bros. bought the rights to and filmed (though in
yet another example of the confusion between their two corporate identities,
the closing credits have the Warners “shield” logo and right next to it a
legend identifying this as “A First National Picture”). It was one of the
movies Jack Warner concocted because the Production Code Administration and the
Legion of Decency were coming down on them and saying that the gangster films
starring Robinson and James Cagney were glamorizing the criminal life — so
Warner decided to keep making crime films with these actors but move them to
the right side of the law,
casting Cagney as a FBI agent in the 1935 film G-Men and Robinson as a undercover cop here. In his
autobiography, Edward G. Robinson recalled that just after he made this movie
he took a vacation to Paris and went on a buying spree of Impressionist art,
coming home with a lot of expensive paintings and no clear idea of how he was
going to pay for them. While he was gone, Bullets or Ballots was released and was a blockbuster hit — so with his
new-found box-office clout he was able to negotiate a new contract with Warner
Bros., giving him story and script approval and also jacking up his salary
enough he could afford his art collection. — 12/20/19
