Dr. Broadway (Paramount, 1942)

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

The next night Charles and I once again watched a couple of early-1940’s “B” movies, though this time they were both thrillers. One was Dr. Broadway, a 1942 Paramount production starring MacDonald Carey as Dr. Timothy Kane, whom the tabloids have nicknamed “Dr. Broadway” because he has a lot of patients in the theatre district, many of them raffish Damon Runyon-style characters who provide much of this film’s entertainment value. I’d long wanted to see this movie because of a spectacular still shown in William K. Everson’s book The Detective in Film, in which Dr. Kane and a blonde woman who turns out to be named Connie Madigan (Jean Phillips) are hanging out – literally – on the ledge of a tall hotel. Supposedly she’s threatening to commit suicide – “I want to go out of this world!” she yells to the inevitable crowd of both police, media people and ordinary spectators that gathers below – and won’t listen to anyone try to talk her out of it. Dr. Kane manages to get her off the ledge and back into her hotel room, where it turns out she was just doing this as a publicity stunt for a nightclub in Harlem featuring a band that is supposedly “out of this world!” (Later Peggy Lee would record a quite engaging novelty song called “Show Me the Way to Get Out of This World [Because That’s Where Everything Is].”)

The police threaten to arrest Connie for all the money they spent responding to her phony suicide threat, but Dr. Kane goes to night court with her and talks the judge out of it by telling him Connie is a decent girl who took that job rather than do something more immoral and Production Code-unmentionable. The judge fines her $250, which she doesn’t have, but Dr. Kane offers to pay for it – only he doesn’t have to because he did a free appendectomy for the judge’s aunt, which he will bill her for if the judge insists on receiving Connie’s fine. Dr. Broadway was directed quite effectively by the young Anthony Mann from a screenplay by Art Arthur based on a story by Boden Chase – who was mostly a Western writer whose best-known credit was for Howard Hawks’ Red River, not exactly a name you’d associate with a raffish comedy-thriller set in New York City. The main intrigue begins when Dr. Kane learns that a convict named Vic Telli (Eduardo Ciannelli, though with his first name Anglicized to “Edward) who was convicted in the first place because of Dr. Kane’s testimony has just got out of prison early and is gunning for the Good Doctor. Actually Vic is terminally ill – he was diagnosed with cancer while in prison and he only has about a month to live – and what he wants Dr. Kane to do for him is withdraw $100,000 out of a safe deposit box and turn it over to Telli’s estranged daughter, Margie Dove – whom he hasn’t seen since he and Margie’s mom broke up over 15 years before.

Only, as you might expect, Vic Telli is murdered by other gangsters out to hijack the $100,000 – one other gangster in particular, Jack Venner (J. Carrol Naish), who runs a seemingly successful tailor shop as the front for his various rackets. (It’s rare in a movie, especially one of this vintage, for the gangster’s front business actually to be thriving on its own.) One of Venner’s thugs tries to mug Dr. Kane for the money (it seemed to be in a package way too small to contain $100,000 – a particular pet peeve of Charles’s, who knows just how bulky money really is, though he reasoned that maybe in 1942 $100 and even $500 bills may have been in relatively common circulation) – only Kane gets it back. The next attempt to steal it from him comes from a hard-edged woman who claims to be Margie Dove (Joan Woodbury, a first-rate actress who probably was kept from the stardom that was her due by an oddly bony face; she was the star of the PRC film Paper Bullets, a.k.a. Gangs, Inc., playing a morally ambiguous woman who’s the key to busting a crime ring, though the actor who got the career boost from it was Alan Ladd as an undercover agent). Woodbury is in only one scene, but it’s one of the film’s high points, as she first seems sincerely uninterested in her dad’s money, then agrees to take it, then drops enough hints that we and Dr. Kane both begin to suspect she’s an impostor. (Charles read the above and pointed out a detail in the script that gives her away: Vic Telli recalled that the last tine he saw his daughter he was holding her hand as her tonsils were removed, but Dr. Kane gave a throat examination to the fake “Margie” and noticed she still had tonsils.)

Venner’s last attempt to steal the money is to kidnap Connie Madigan, who after their run-in on the ledge went to work for Dr. Kane as his receptionist (ya remember receptionists? I hope the man who invented voicemail is in a circle of hell as bad or worse than Hitler’s!). The bad guys kidnap Connie and demand that Dr. Kale bring the money – earlier there was a supposed payoff but Kane substituted worthless paper for the bills, and the Tailor from Hell stamped the back of each one with his logo and sent them back. Kane leads the police to the gang’s hideout but it’s once again on a top-floor room in a hotel, and this time Connie is too scared to make it across the ledge to the room and safety once the cops have captured the gang, So Kane has to talk her back across the ledge and into his arms. Dr. Broadway is an odd movie, on the cusp between the light-hearted comedy-thrillers that were the norm for crime films in the late 1930’s (inspired largely by the smash success of Woody Van Dyke’s 1934 The Thin Man, based on a Dashiell Hammett novel) and the new, tougher style later known as film noir that was inspired by John Huston’s 1941 The Maltese Falcon, another Hammett adaptation.

Anthony Mann would later become known for his noirs (the little-known 1945 The Great Flamarion as well as better-known films like Desperate and Railroaded) and still later for his Westerns (though his first major Western, Winchester .73, was basically a film noir in Western drag), but he was already quite accomplished when he made this, which was apparently his first feature film for theatres (previously he’d directed two experimental TV movies in 1939 for the 100 or so TV sets in existence in the U.S. that could receive NBC’s pilot-program telecasts). MacDonald Carey is an acceptable leading man (though the role really demanded a Cagney or Bogart), Jean Phillips an engaging ingénue and Joan Woodbury scorches the screen in her one scene. The cinematographer is yet another German expat, Theodor Sparkühl (though as he worked in the U.S. his first name would acquire a second “e” at the end and his last name would lose its umlaut), who would later shoot some of Paramount’s most significant noirs and here he’s clearly trying to get as many of those dark, “German” compositions into a story that veers back and forth between the worlds of Runyon and Hammett. Dr. Broadway is actually a quite engaging film, and I’m wondering if there were any plans at Paramount to use it to launch a series with the “Dr. Broadway” character that got sidetracked by the U.S. involvement in World War II and the changes in the film business that followed the war: the demise of the “B” picture, the advent of television, the antitrust decisions that severed the studios from their theatre chains (Ronald Reagan blamed the collapse of his career on the divestment, which is one reason why when Reagan became President antitrust enforcement virtually stopped altogether) and the tougher approach to crime films that became standard for the first decade after the end of the war.