Broadway (Universal, 1942)

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

Last night I ran Charles and I the 1942 Universal remake of Broadway, the 1929 gangster story that had been a hit play on Broadway (written by Philip Dunning but so heavily doctored by the young George Abbott he got co-writer credit) in 1927 and had been filmed in 1929 as Universal’s biggest production to that time. The 1942 version at least had bigger “name” stars in the two male leads – George Raft and Pat O’Brien – whom Universal seems to have picked up after Warner Bros. decided they were through with them. It’s impossible to watch any of the films Raft actually made in the early 1940’s without thinking, “He turned down High Sierra and The Maltese Falcon to make this?” At least the writers of the 1942 Broadway – Bruce Manning (also the producer and credited with “adaptation”), Felix Jackson and John Bright – came up with a clever gimmick to incorporate Raft into the story. They had him play a character called “George Raft” and introduced him in 1942, when as a major movie star he flies back to New York City and revisits the old haunts, including the Paradise nightclub where his career started in 1929.

Then doomy music creeps onto the soundtrack and we flash back to 1929, when Prohibition was still in force and the Paradise was nominally owned by Nick (S. Z. Sakall, who was also in Casablanca that year – a film Raft had desperately wanted to star in, only to have Jack Warner tell him, “After High Sierra and The Maltese Falcon Bogart’s a bigger star than you are now!”) but really the subject of a turf war between rival bootleggers and gangsters Steve Crandall (Broderick Crawford) and Scar Edwards (Damian O’Flynn). The two had previously set a dividing line at 125th Street, with Crandall getting the liquor market south of that and Edwards getting it north, but Crandall has decided to crash Edwards’ territory and begins the war by hijacking one of Edwards’ shipments (Scotch smuggled in, supposedly from the source in Scotland though more likely from Canada, rather than sloppily manufactured homebrew). The two confront each other in the back room of the Paradise (a set Universal recycled for the L.A. jazz club in The Crimson Canary) and Edwards demands payment for the booze Crandall and his men stole.

Crandall responds by shooting him dead and he and his two leading henchmen take him out of the club and try to make it look like he’s merely drunk, not dead. But they’re witnessed by Billie Moore (Janet Blair), whom Raft is rehearsing as a dance partner to do vaudeville and hopefully break into Broadway musicals. Billie is torn between Raft;’s ambitions for her – as in the original, his character is clearly in love with her but she’s demanding that they remain a professional partnership only – but she’s also being cruised by Steve Crandall, who’s lavishing jeweled bracelets and other trinkets on her. Among the women in the chorus line is Pearl (Anne Gwynne), who previously dated Crandall until he threw her over for Billie and is still carrying the proverbial torch – until she learns that not only did Crandall shoot Scar, he did so when Scar’s back was turned to him. In a final scene copied almost verbatim from the original, she confronts him in that back room (which is beginning to look like New York City’s Murder Central) and shoots him while he’s facing her. The police detective, Dan McCorn (Pat O’Broen, a good deal less overbearing than usual), decides to report Crandall’s death as a suicide and let Pearl get away with it – but when the film reverts to the 1942 framing story Raft explains that she turned herself in anyway, served several years and was then released. (The Production Code Administration struck again!)

The 1942 Broadway is interesting mainly for the way it plays off the speculations that had always surrounded Raft, including the claim that he’d been a gangster in real life before quitting the life and becoming a successful entertainer (the character played by Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. in Little Caesar, who quits Rico’s gang to become a Broadway dance star, was supposedly based on Raft), and it’s full of engaging in-jokes. When Raft, in 1942, walks into the decidedly low-budget set of the Paradise he says, “I remember it as being much bigger than this!” (in 1929 it, like so many alleged “nightclubs” in big-budget musicals, looked like an airplane hangar done up in Art Deco; in 1942, for once in a Hollywood movie, a nightclub set actually looked like a real nightclub), and later Raft confronts one of the gangsters and says he wants to star in Broadway musicals “and maybe even pictures.” He says this while he’s flipping a coin repeatedly the way he did in the 1932 Scarface, and the skeptical gangster asks, “Doing that?” (It wasn’t the last time a George Raft film had an in-joke about coin-flipping; in the 1959 Some Like It Hot Raft sees one of his gangster associates, played by Edward G. Robinson, Jr., doing it and asks, “Where’d you learn that cheap trick?”)

There are a few lapses in the 1942 Broadway – elements the 1929 film got right and this one misses: Anne Gwynne totally fails to bring the pathos and intensity to Pearl Evelyn Brent (Josef von Sternberg’s favorite actress until he discovered Marlene Dietrich) did so beautifully in 1929. This film also fails to dramatize Billie’s crisis of conscience – whether to lie to protect her boyfriend Crandall or admit she saw him and his pals take the supposedly “drunk” but really dead Scar Edwards out of the Paradise – and once again, as good as Raft is in the lead (albeit playing himself – or at least the long-rumored version of himself), in 1942 as in 1929 the actor this story really needed was James Cagney. (A pity Universal couldn’t have waited to make this until after Cagney completed his Warner Bros. contract the same year with Yankee Doodle Dandy.) It’s also interesting that rather than use the original songs from the 1927 play (the 1929 film did and they were pretty terrible), they dragged in real songs from the 1920’s – many of them, interestingly, written by Black composers: Shelton Brooks’ “Some of These Days” and “The Darktown Strutters’ Ball,” Maceo Pinkard’s “Sweet Georgia Brown,” Eubie Blake’s “I’m Just Wild About Harry.” Nonetheless, the musical arrangements are closer to 1942 than 1929 and the women playing the Paradise’s chorus girls wear long hair in 1942 style instead of getting themselves bobbed the way women did in 1929. (I’ll never forget my sense of irony when while attending high school in the 1960’s I read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” – in an era in which men were showing their rebellion by growing their hair long, I was reading a story about an era in which women showed their rebellion by cutting their hair short.)

Both Broadway films have their pluses and minuses, and the biggest plus for this one is – surprisingly – the performance of Broderick Crawford as Crandall. Outfitted with a “roo” moustache to let us know he’s the bad guy, he’s about the only cast member who looks like he actually stepped in from the 1920’s and he plays the part with the same power and authority he’d bring to his star-making role in All the King’s Men – a movie he got to do only because the originally cast star, Spencer Tracy, walked out at the last minute – six years later. People with the overall “look” and physique of Broderick Crawford don’t become major box-office movie stars (look at the frustrating career of the recently deceased Brian Dennehy, a superb actor relegated to second-fiddle parts in which he regularly out-acted the stars), but he pulled it off and it’s clear from this film that he had the chops for it even though it would take a few years and a change of studio from Universal to Columbia to pull it off. And though the story of Broadway is simply not that strong, it’s tempting to imagine a modern-day remake that would update the story and make the central figure an aspiring rapper caught in the rivalry between two drug cartels.