Great Guy (Grand National, 1936)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night, after the Lifetime movie Who Is Killing the Cheerleaders? (something of a misnomer since the only cheerleaders who were killed were offed in the backstory 10 years before the main action) and a decent interval during which I washed the dinner dishes, I ran my husband Charles the last film we hadn’t recently screened in the four-film two-DVD boxed set American Movie Classics put out of James Cagney’s public-domain titles. The film was actually the earliest in the box: Great Guy, made for the independent Grand National studio in 1936 after a year in which Cagney had successfully sued Warner Bros. to break his contract because they had violated the rules on his billing. He actually filed the suit at the end of 1935 but the motion-picture business was so tight an oligopoly that no other major studio dared risk Jack Warner’s wrath by signing Cagney. He had to wait nearly a year before he got another chance to work in films, and the man who gave it to him was Edward L. Alperson, founder and CEO of Grand National, which had launched in 1935 as a small studio with big ambitions. One of their big ambitions was to land a major star and thus produce product that had a chance of breaking the majors’ monopolies on the most desirable (and lucrative) theatres.

Alperson signed Cagney and for his first film with him settled on a vehicle that -- like the movie On the Waterfront 18 years later -- began as a series of articles in a major magazine. The series was written by James Edward Grant -- who later became John Wayne’s pet writer (when you hired Wayne for a film you also had to hire Grant to rewrite the script for him; some directors chafed at this while others reasoned it made sense for a star of Wayne’s caliber to have his own personal writer tailor the scripts especially for him and make sure the lines were comfortable for him to say) -- for the Saturday Evening Post and dealt with Johnnie Cave, fearless and incorruptible inspector for the New York Bureau of Weights and Measures. When Charles and I first saw this film years ago we joked about the triviality of the racket -- as if Warners had taken all the good ones for their Cagney and Edward G. Robinson vehicles and Grand National was left with something as trivial as the Bureau of Weights and Measures.

But the film itself, scripted by Henry McCarty, Henry Johnson and Harry Ruskin (did you have to have the first name “Henry” or a derivative thereof to work on writing this film?) from Grant’s stories, actually does a good job showing both the tricks unscrupulous grocers and other merchants pull on consumers to short-weight them (the box of strawberries with a false bottom, the chicken weighted down by lead slugs with drop out of the bird under the scale afterwards, the secretly rigged gallon indicators at gas stations) and the stratagems by which the Bureau’s agents catch them and collect the evidence needed. Great Guy inevitably cast Cagney as Johnnie Cave, who rises to head the Bureau of Weights and Measures’ enforcement force after his predecessor Joel Green (Wallis Clark) is involved in an accident -- he hit a streetcar with his car but did so only because another car drove him out of his right lane and into the streetcar. He ends up in the hospital for this and doesn’t want any visitors except Cave because he’s fearful that the gangsters who staged his “accident” and ran him off the road into that streetcar may try again and finish the job.

Joel warns Cave that while he trusts him as far as honesty and incorruptibility are concerned, he needs to remember to keep his temper under wraps and do his new job with his brains rather than his fists. Needless to say, Cave is temperamentally unable to follow this advice -- well, it wouldn’t be a James Cagney movie, especially one from the 1930’s, if he didn’t show off his fisticuffs in at least one scene, and the writing committee for Great Guy gave him a lot more than just one. Indeed, they seem deliberately to have knocked off the formula that had made Cagney a Warner Bros. star in the first place; following the lead of Cagney’s 1935 blockbuster hit G-Men (in which Warners had answered the Production Code objections that his and Robinson’s previous films had glorified crime by moving these actors to the right side of the law and casting Cagney as an FBI agent whose big conflict was having to learn to abide by the iron discipline J. Edgar Hoover famously insisted on), it’s a typical Cagney good-guy vehicle in which he faces down the secret organizations that are masterminding the scams that cheat consumers -- out of small sums, to be sure (“a penny here and a penny there,” one character says, back when a penny was real money), but small sums that add up and attract the interest of both corrupt political clubs and out-and-out crooks.

The corrupt political club leader is Marty Cavanaugh (Robert Gleckler), who offers Cave a cushy job as head of the “Seventh District” (presumably of New York’s legendarily corrupt Tammany Hall) at twice what the Bureau of Weights and Measures is paying him, obviously to get him out of the way. When Cave turns it down the gang strikes back and kidnaps him in the one sequence in this film that approaches the noir look (imdb.com lists Great Guy as “crime, drama, film noir, but it really isn’t noir -- other early-1930’s films like William Wellman’s Safe in Hell and Charles Vidor’s Sensation Hunters come a lot closer to what later became known as film noir), in which they carefully keep him and us in suspense as to just what the hell they intend to do with him. We soon learn that Marty Cavanaugh is merely the lieutenant for a “Big Boss” whose identity is supposed to be a huge secret, but it only takes about one-third of this film’s 65-minute running time (about the length of Cagney’s typical Warners programmers as well) before both we and Cave learn who the “Big Boss” is: Abel Canning (Henry Kolker), whose above-board reputation is as a major civic leader and philanthropist but we soon learn is the owner of a food-service company that is consistently bilking an orphanage run by Mrs. Ogilvie (Mary Gordon, later Sherlock Holmes’ landlady Mrs. Hudson in the Basil Rathbone-Nigel Bruce Holmes movies).

The city’s mayor (Douglas Wood) is in thrall to Canning, regularly plays golf with him, and fires Mrs. Ogilvie at Canning’s demand -- which provides Cave the clue he needs to figure out what’s going on. Cave’s campaign against Canning is complicated by the fact that Cave’s girlfriend, Janet Henry (Mae Clarke, in her third and last film with Cagney: the first two were The Public Enemy, in which she got the famous grapefruit in her face, and Lady Killer), is also Cave’s secretary, and naturally she admires her boss and doesn’t believe it when her boyfriend tells her he’s a crook. As Cave gets closer to unmasking Canning, the gang retaliates by faking a holdup and an auto accident and framing Cave as having committed robbery and crashed his car while drunk -- a scene repeated three years later after Cagney went back to Warner Bros. (who got his original court victory reversed on appeal) in the quite good and underrated movie Each Dawn I Die.

Ultimately the MacGuffin turns out to be a document Cave was planning to turn over to the district attorney with the evidence needed to prosecute Canning for ripping off the orphanage -- a thug for the gang, Burton (Joe Sawyer), steals it from him and hides it by peeling back some of the ceiling cover in his closet. Burton tries to blackmail Canning by demanding $5,000 instead of the originally agreed-upon $500 for the paper, and in the final confrontation Canning has recovered the paper and is trying to burn it when the police, alerted by Janet (who’s finally realized her boss is a crook), show up in the person of Cave’s friend Captain Hanlon (Edward MacNamara) and arrest him and his stooges. “B” Movies author Dan Miller called Great Guy “a misfire of a film,” but I don’t think it’s that bad even though it would have been a good deal better had it been a Warner Bros. production.

Jack Warner would have assigned a faster, more exciting director than the one this film got, John G. Blystone (who usually did comedies at Hal Roach and whose brother Stanley Blystone was a character actor there), and Warners would also have given the film their usual thundering musical score. Without the infrastructure to produce and record an original score, and without a music library of their own (most Grand National films rented their scores from the Meyer Synchronizing Service, and Abe Meyer’s themes become so hauntingly familiar if you watch a lot of 1930’s “B”’s you practically want to wave to them as you hear them), Alperson and Blystone apparently decided not to use any music at all except over the opening and closing credits and as “source music” during a party being thrown by Marty Cavanaugh which Cave crashes on his way to nailing Canning.

Still, Great Guy is a highly competent film, Cagney delivers the goods, and except for the excruciatingly unfunny “comic relief” character Pat Haley (James Burke) who’s always spouting off blarney about Ireland (where he claims to have grown up) I kept expecting the really Irish-American Cagney to call him on, the acting is generally competent and the action well staged. And it was a blessing to see the beautiful original Grand National logo -- a clock tower whose hands “wiped” in the company’s name across the clock face -- on Great Guy after it was hacked off AMC’s print of Cagney’s other Grand National film, Something to Sing About.