Curtain Call (RKO, 1940)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After these two rather lame movies, TCM surprised us July 20 with a real gem I’m sure my husband Charles and I had seen before: Curtain Call, a marvelous RKO comedy from 1940 directed by Frank Woodruff from a script by Dalton Trumbo based on an original story by Howard J. Green. When Mel Brooks’s first feature film, The Producers, was released in 1968 and became a hit, quite a lot of people didn’t realize that the basic premise – a Broadway theatrical producer socks his investors for several times more than the show will cost to put on, deliberately makes the show as bad as possible so it will flop, and with the backers assuming that all their money was lost on the play the producer will abscond with the overages – was a long-standing urban legend on Broadway well before Brooks grabbed it and made his film. In the 1930’s Groucho Marx had tried to interest MGM production chief Irving Thalberg in making a Marx Brothers movie out of it, but Thalberg turned it down and had them make A Night at the Opera instead. (A Night at the Opera is a great movie and screamingly hilarious, but the Marx Brothers in The Producers would have been just as good.) In 1944 RKO used the plot premise of The Producers – an unscrupulous producer socks his backers for way more than he needs to make his film, deliberately tries to make it as bad as possible, then freaks out when it looks from the rushes like the film will actually be good and draw audiences – in The Falcon in Hollywood and played it seriously as the MacGuffin of a murder mystery. Four years earlier the same studio made Curtain Call, about a small-town teenager named Helen Middleton (Barbara Read) whose great ambition is to be a playwright and get produced on Broadway. She gets her chance when Broadway director Donald Avery (Alan Mowbray) comes to her small town to do some duck hunting. Avery and his producing partner Geoffrey “Jeff” Crandall (Donald MacBride, who’d at least calmed himself down a bit from his repulsive character as a vicious hotel manager in the Marx Brothers’ Room Service) are locked in a battle of egos with their temperamental star, Charlotte Morley (Helen Vinson), who’s threatening to leave them and sign with another producer after the one last play remaining on their contract.

For reasons Messrs. Green and Trumbo don’t make clear – either they want to take her down a peg so they can re-sign her, they want to wreck her career so she can’t make money for anyone else, or just to get back at her for all the grief she’s caused them over the years – they offer her Helen’s abysmal play, The End of Everything. To their (and our) surprise, Helen actually loves the damned thing and insists that Avery not change a word of the script. Avery tries to get Helen to relinquish her contractual protection against changes by dating her, but Helen guilelessly turns him down and says she’s doing him a favor by allowing him for once in his career to be guided by artistic rather than commercial considerations. When The End of Everything goes into rehearsal the leading man, Leslie Barrivale (Ralph Forbes, wasted as usual – why his superb performance in the 1933 Monogram film The Phantom Broadcast didn’t pave the way for him to play the doomed-romantic leading roles he would have been great at is a mystery to me) finds Helen’s dialogue literally unspeakable and walks out. Helen disappears from the rehearsals and spends the next five weeks hiding out in a rooming house and racking up a large bill in back rent, and with her incommunicado Avery invokes a clause in the standard playwright’s contract that allows the director to rewrite a script if the author isn’t available to make the changes herself. Helen’s small-town boyfriend, Ted Palmer (John Archer), tracks her down and pays off Helen’s landlady, then insists on taking her to the opening night of The End of Everything – and Helen is angry when she hears the audience laughing their heads off at something she intended as a deep-seated tragedy. Ultimately it comes to a surprisingly ambiguous ending; Ted proposes to Helen but with the implication that he expects her to give up her authorial ambitions and be content to be a salesperson’s wife, but Helen announces that she’s already written a second play and it’s unclear whether she’s going to insist on being a working wife. Curtain Call is a gem, a vest-pocket delight of a film, and Barbara Read’s totally innocent portrayal of the heroine is one of the best things about it. She had an iffy career, getting to work with major directors like Leo McCarey in Make Way for Tomorrow and James Whale in The Road Back and also appearing as Margo Lane in some mid-1940’s films about The Shadow, but she ran through four husbands (the last being William Talman, the hapless prosecutor of the Perry Mason TV series) and committed suicide in 1963 at age 48, leaving a note blaming it on “ill health.”