The Glass Key (Paramount, 1942)

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

I got out of bed early to watch the Turner Classic Movies “Noir Alley” repeat presentation of the 1942 film The Glass Key, which I skipped last night so I could watch the Lifetime “premiere,” Obsessed with the Babysitter, instead. The Glass Key started out as a 1931 novel by Dashiell Hammett, the fourth of the five books he completed before his late-in-life descent into alcoholic unproductivity. Like his previous three – Red Harvest, The Dain Curse and The Maltese Falcon – The Glass Key was first published as a serial in the pulp magazine Black Mask and then was collated and reprinted as a book. I haven’t read it in years but I recall it as probably Hammett’s most complex and thematically rich novel, full of morally ambiguous characters, political machinations, uneasy interchanges between the upper-class and the underclass, and some dazzling dream sequences involving the hero, Ned Beaumont (renamed Ed Beaumont in both film versions), who, filled up with booze and drugs by the baddies who’ve kidnaped him, dreams that he’s locked into a room with a glass key on the floor – his only means of escape – but there are snakes all over the floor who will lethally bite him if he tries to reach for the key. (There’s an intriguing note on the imdb.com “trivia” page for this film that indicates that glass keys really existed; the gimmick was that they could only be used once because they would shatter after they turned the lock.)

The history of Hammett’s work on film is rather peculiar: in 1931 Warner Bros. bought the rights to The Maltese Falcon and made a quite good version with Ricardo Cortez as Sam Spade, Bebe Daniels as the femme fatale, Dudley Digges as Casper Gutman, Dwight Frye as his “gunsel” (an underworld slang term for the kept boyfriend of a Gay gangster) Wilmer and Roy Del Ruth directing. But at the time it wasn’t anything more than just another Warners crime picture and Hammett didn’t become big box office until MGM bought the rights to his last novel, The Thin Man, and filmed it in 1934 with William Powell and Myrna Loy as Hammett’s husband-and-wife detective team Nick and Nora Charles. The Thin Man was a smash hit and so Paramount, which had bought The Glass Key in 1931 as a vehicle for Gary Cooper, reactivated the project and, after Cooper walked out on Paramount in a dispute over his contract, put George Raft in the lead for a 1935 release. Meanwhile, Warner Bros. did a second version of The Maltese Falcon in 1936 called Satan Met a Lady, with Warren William and Bette Davis, with the script rewritten heavily to accommodate the kind of screwball-comedy banter audiences had loved in The Thin Man. It was Davis’s last film before she fled to Britain in hopes of escaping her contract by working abroad, and though she failed she did get better parts when she got home. The version of The Maltese Falcon we all know was the third and best one, made in 1941 with neophyte director John Huston and Humphrey Bogart and Mary Astor in the leads; it was a huge hit and its success inspired Paramount to dust off their own Hammett property, The Glass Key, and re-team the stars of their surprise hit This Gun for Hire, Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake. Ironically, though Ladd supposedly got the part of Beaumont as a reward for the success of This Gun for Hire, his position in the billing didn’t change: he’s third, after Brian Donlevy and Lake, just as he’d been billed third (after Robert Preston and Lake) in This Gun for Hire.

I’ve seen The Glass Key more than once before but I’ve never really warmed to it. The writer, Jonathan Latimer, was a veteran of the pulps and his first novel was called Murder in a Madhouse (a book which irritated me because of its racism: the detective character immediately rules out the two African-American characters as suspects because “they are not capable of purposeful crime”) – two of his books got filmed by Universal as part of ther “Crime Club” series (which competed with Warners’ “Clue Club” series of “B” mysteries) in the 1930’s. The director is Stuart Heisler, who has six previous credits listed on his imdb.com page, including Among the Living, another important early noir, but shortly after this movie he enlisted in the U.S. Army Signal Corps and didn’t make another civilian film until 1945. One of the problems with The Glass Key is it’s only 80 minutes long – 20 minutes shorter than the 1941 Maltese Falcon and way too short to do justice to Hammett’s rich, complex novel. It seems to give us a Reader’s Digest condensed version of a story that deserved to be told in fuller length. We learn through a nice exposition scene in which various characters talk about him that Paul Madvig (Brian Donlevy) is a working-class guy who’s risen in the unnamed city’s underworld to running a corrupt political machine that, among other things, has the local district attorney, Farr (Donald MacBride, whose most famous role is probably as the bonkers hotel manager in the Marx Brothers’ Room Service), on his payroll. In order to screw over rival gangster and political boss Nick Varna (Joseph Calleia), Madvig has just decided to throw the support of his organization to “reform” gubernatorial candidate Ralph Henry (Moroni Olsen), apparently because he’s got the hots for Henry’s daughter Janet (Veronica Lake). Unfortunately Henry also has a scapegrace son named Taylor (Richard Denning, who like Jerome Cowan in The Maltese Falcon has only a brief role but makes an indelible impression – indeed he’s so much more electrifying as a screen personality than the almost terminally taciturn Alan Ladd one might wonder why he wasn’t playing the lead) who owes a ton of money to Varna’s gambling establishments. (One interesting thing about this film is it’s ahead of its time in treating gambling as an addiction like alcohol or drugs.)

Ed Beaumont (Alan Ladd) is Madvig’s assistant and general “fixer,” and one of his tasks is to keep Madvig’s sister Opal (Bonita Granville, who looks so much younger than Brian Donlevy she’d have been more believable as his daughter than his sister) out of trouble – which she’s got into with Taylor Henry just before he’s found dead in the street. Madvig becomes the number one suspect in Taylor’s death, and Varna and his paper, the Observer – which he effectively controls because its publisher, Clyde Matthews (Arthur Loft), is in hock to him: Varna holds a mortgage on the Observer’s building – go on an all-out crusade to get Madvig arrested and convicted of Taylor’s murder to destroy his machine and Ralph Henry’s chances of being elected. Varna offers Beaumont $10,000 and a chance to run his own underground casino if he changes sides and gives him dirt on Madvig, Beaumont refuses and two of Varna’s thugs, Jeff (William Bendix) and Rusty (Eddie Marr), assault him and hold him in a grungy-looking basement room for days, regularly beating him up, until he starts a fire in the room and is able to get them to open the door so he can escape. He spends several days in the hospital recuperating and romancing his nurse (who seemed to me to be a better match for him than the seedier women in the rest of the dramatis personae) until Madvig and Janet show up. Janet accepted Madvig’s marriage proposal even though she can’t stand him, and when Beaumont gets out of the hospital he mounts a full-court press to find out who really killed Taylor. Meanwhile, a witness to the event who fingered Madvig as the killer himself gets killed by a sniper shot from a window, and that just adds one more to the list of crimes Madvig is being accused of. In the end it turns out that Jeff shot the witness and tried to frame Madvig for it; Madvig confesses but neither Beaumont nor Janet believe him. Madvig is convinced Janet killed her brother and is taking the fall for her; but [spoiler alert!] the actual killer is neither Madvig nor Janet but Taylor’s father, Ralph Henry, who got into a drunken argument with him outside and pushed him into the ground, where Taylor hit his head against a curb and suffered a fatal injury. In the end Beaumont and Janet high-tail it out of town for New York and leave Madvig, his power still intact, scrambling for another gubernatorial candidate to replace Ralph Henry.

Watching this version of The Glass Key makes me curious about the 1935 version (I just did a search on amazon.com and found one copy available for order, so I ordered it), though I suspect it wasn’t a worthy filmization of the book and certainly this one isn’t. As my husband Charles, who joined me for the last 30 minutes or so, noted, it really looks like a Warner Bros. film even though it wasn’t – especially in the sheer speed with which it moves (though Heisler is a lot more reticent about deploying Victor Young’s acceptable but not great musical score than a Warners director would have been), and it’s not surprising that Heisler worked at Warners later and did one of Humphrey Bogart’s last films for them, Chain Lightning. The Glass Key is also a frustrating movie in that a lot of the minor characters are superbly cast but the leads are weak: Brian Donlevy, playing a serious version of a character he’d already spoofed in Preston Sturges’ The Great McGinty two years earlier, is too overbearing and just plain mean; Veronica Lake is ice-cold and too much the enigmatic blonde to get us to warm up to her in a character we’re clearly supposed to like; and as for Alan Ladd – well, I’ll let Raymond Chandler (who had to put up with Ladd and Lake as the leads in his original screen story The Blue Dahlia just after Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall had been incandescent in the adaptation of Chandler’s The Big Sleep) dis him for me: “Alan Ladd is a high-school boy’s idea of a tough guy. Bogart is the real thing.”

Among the great performances we get from the supporting cast are William Bendix’s oddly homoerotic portrayal of the thug – he calls Ladd “my rubber ball” and throws so many endearments he comes off as the dominant in a Gay S/M couple – and Margaret Hayes as Eloise Matthews, who married the Observer publisher for his money and then, when she realizes he no longer has any, starts vamping Beaumont and refuses to come to her husband’s bedroom, following which he shoots himself. There’s also Frances Gifford in the nicely hard-boiled role of Beaumont’s nurse, which whom he carries on a non-serious flirtation and she, equally non-seriously, pretends to be interested. Another oddity about The Glass Key is that it seems to have no particular sense of time; the cars and clothes are those of 1942 but the overall ambience is that of the 1920’s (the dive bar in which Beaumont has one of his confrontations with Jeff and Rusty is pretty obviously a speakeasy, which would have made sense since Hammett published his novel while Prohibition was still in effect but seems anachronistic by 1942 – while the political headquarters shown in the film look like something from the late 19th or early 20th century. The Glass Key is an O.K. movie as it stands but it really deserves a remake that would savor the political and moral complexities of the book, though there’d be the two problems of how to cast it and how to make it look (albeit there’s the example of the 1956 Slightly Scarlet, based on James M. Cain’s novel Love’s Lovely Counterfeit, directed by Allan Dwan and photographed by John Alton, that stands as the shining example of how to do the classic noir look in color – and in its portrayal of two political machines fighting for control of a mid-sized city and the ostensible “reformers” being as corrupt as the people they’re trying to replace, it owes a lot to The Glass Key!).