The Glass Key (Paramount, 1935)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After the Lifetime movie I ran Charles something I’d been looking forward to seeing since the weekend before last, when Turner Classic Movies’ “Noir Alley” ran the 1942 Paramount version of Dashiell Hammett’s novel The Glass Key. I was inspired to see if I could find an online copy of the earlier film of The Glass Key, also made at Paramount – in 1935, when the success of MGM’s film of Hammett’s The Thin Man led Paramount to dredge up their own Hammett property (just as the 1942 remake was inspired by the success Warner Bros. had just had with Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon). Paramount bought The Glass Key right after its first publication as a book in 1931 (it was serialized in the pulp magazine Black Mask before that) and intended Gary Cooper for the lead role of Ned Beaumont (his name was changed to Ed Beaumont in both films), friend, aide-de-camp and all-around fixer for political boss Paul Madvig. Instead Cooper starred in an original screen story by Hammett called City Streets (included as a bonus item on my DVD of The Glass Key) and The Glass Key went on hiatus for four years.

In 1935 Paramount reactivated the property and again announced it as a Gary Cooper vehicle – which would have been an interesting piece of anti-type casting – but instead of making it Cooper got into a contract dispute with the studio and walked out when they wouldn’t give him a raise. So Paramount put George Raft into the lead – and Raft turned it into a typical vehicle. As my husband Charles joked afterwards, “He does everything except flip a coin!” Neither Raft nor Alan Ladd, the star of the remake, really inhabits the role the way Humphrey Bogart did with Sam Spade or William Powell did with Nick Charles in The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man, respectively – still the two best films of Hammett’s work, but somewhat surprisingly the rest of the 1935 cast is consistently better than their counterparts seven years later. What’s more, not only do the two films have the same running time (80 minutes), they track surprisingly closely – one gets the impression Jonathan Latimer, who wrote the 1942 version, closely followed the original adaptation by Kathryn Scola and Kubec Glasmon (Glasmon and his earlier writing partner, John Bright, had written The Public Enemy and several of James Cagney’s earlier Warners vehicles – which set me to wondering what this film could have been like if Paramount had been able to borrow Cagney from Warners for it) for this version.

The most impressive performance here is Edward Arnold’s as Madvig: where Brian Donlevy played him in the 1942 version in a state of continual bluster, Arnold – in a role that essentially warmed him up for all the corrupt political bosses he would play in Frank Capra’s later films – shows real dignity and pathos in his impossible crush on Janet Henry (Claire Dodd, who usually played villainesses but here is quite effective as a heroine – much more so than Veronica Lake, who was so glacial and impassive she seemed almost robotic; she’s a fascinating screen “presence” though whatever she’s doing has precious little to do with acting, and Dodd makes Janet Henry seem more human even though the other female lead out-acts her – more on her later), son of the “reform” Senator Madvig and his political machine, the Voters’ League, is backing. The other woman, Madvig’s sister Opal, is played quite effectively by an actress billed as Rosalind Culli but later known as Rosalind Keith; she’s closer to Arnold’s age than Bonita Granville was to Donlevy in the 1942 version and therefore more believable as Madvig’s sister (Granville would have been easier to accept as Donlevy’s daughter than his sister!). She turns in an excellent performance and it is she, not Janet, who ends up with Beaumont at the fade – the main plot difference between the two. The gangster Madvig is trying to put out of business in his newfound role as a “reformer” is changed from Nick Varna (in Hammett’s original and the 1942 film) to “Shad O’Rory” and is played by Robert Gleckler (who menaced James Cagney the next year in his first Grand National “indie,” Great Guy, the next year) – and though it’s a one-dimensional villain role he is considerably less annoying than Joseph Calleia in the remake).

The part of Jeff, so memorably played by William Bendix in the remake, goes here to Guinn “Big Boy” Williams, who’s almost as good – and almost as Gay, though with the Production Code Administration and the Legion of Decency breathing down their necks the writers and director Frank Tuttle (who shoots this pretty flatly except for a Sternbergian scene shot through a grating and a couple of dark nighttime shots that anticipate film noir) don’t carry through Hammett’s hints as fully as their counterparts did in 1942. (Hammett was fascinated by Gay people and once hired a Black Gay couple as his manservants just because he liked watching how they interacted with each other.) The small but pivotal part of Taylor Henry, son of the “reform” Senator whose murder sparks the plot (Madvig is accused of it by his political enemies, but it was really committed by Senator Henry himself during an argument over Taylor’s habitual gambling and the money he owed to O’Rory), is played by the young Ray Milland, who like Richard Denning in the remake might have been a better choice for Beaumont than the actor who actually played him. Milland would make his “bones” in film noir in 1948 with John Farrow’s masterpiece The Big Clock, and though he was still young and unformed as a screen personality some hints of his later star status shine through here – like Denning in the remake and Jerome Cowan in the 1941 Maltese Falcon, he gets dispatched all too soon! Overall the 1935 Glass Key is an accomplished film that I generally like better than the remake, though neither version counts as “definitive” the way the 1941 Maltese Falcon and the 1934 Thin Man do and one aches to see a film of The Glass Key that would preserve the richness and complexity of Hammett’s original novel.

One aspect of the 1935 film of The Glass Key is it offers the only example we have on film of George Raft playing a character written by Dashiell Hammett. In 1940 he was under contract to Warner Bros. and was offered the lead in the film of W. R. Burnett's gangster novel High Sierra, which he turned down because the Production Code Administration had demanded that the character Raft was to play die at the end of the film even though he had lived in the book. Then he was offered The Maltese Falcon but turned it down because he didn't want to work for a first-time director, John Huston. “Let someone else be his training wheels,” Raft said. So one attraction for the 1935 film of The Glass Key is to see how Raft might have done as Sam Spade – though I think there's a better indication of how Raft might have played Spade: Race Street, a 1949 RKO movie that had nothing to do with Hammett but did cast Raft as a private detective in San Francisco. My suspicion was that had Raft made The Maltese Falcon, he would have turned in a good but workmanlike performance (much the way Ricardo Cortez did in the first 1931 version of The Maltese Falcon) but wouldn't have been so “right,” so perfect, as Humphrey Bogart, whose off-screen life was so much like his on-screen persona in this and his other “hard-boiled” films he wasn't so much playing as being these roles.