The Big Street (RKO, 1942)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, October 4) I watched a film on Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” show on Turner Classic movies a film that really isn’t noir at all, though it is a great movie: The Big Street, made at RKO in 1942 and produced by Damon Runyon, who also supplied the 1940 Collier’s magazine story “Little Pinks” on which it was based. Runyon also took his director, Irving Reis (pronounced “reese,” not “rice,” by the way), away from the low-budget Falcon detective series (where he’d just made The Falcon Takes Over, the first and quite good adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s novel Farewell, My Lovely, though it was remade in 1944 as Murder, My Sweet, which I’d name as the definitive film noir if I had to pick just one). There are a lot of great aspects to The Big Street, but the one that has put it on my list of all-time personal favorites is the casting of the female lead: Lucille Ball. Just about everybody who knows Lucille Ball at all knows her from I Love Lucy and the various spinoffs of it she made over the years, but her film work in the 1940’s proves that she was a considerably rangier actress than she got to show on TV. Indeed, one of the things she did best was spoiled gold-digging diva bitch, which she’d already done two years before in Dorothy Arzner’s Dance, Girl, Dance and repeated to perfection here. Ball was a graduate of the same acting school in New York, run by John Murray Anderson (director of most of the Ziegfeld Follies on stage and the stunning 1930 musical King of Jazz), that also taught Bette Davis. There’s a lot of La Davis in Ball’s performance here, and though the “suits” at RKO wanted a bigger “name” for the role (like Barbara Stanwyck or Jean Arthur), Runyon, to his credit, insisted on Ball. The male lead, “Little Pinks,” a busboy who works at the club where Gloria Lyons (Lucille Ball), whom he nicknames “Your Highness,” entertains, is played by Henry Fonda on loan from 20th Century-Fox. According to an imdb.com “Trivia” item, Fonda had briefly dated Ball and Ball’s husband, Desi Arnaz, often showed up on set to make sure the two weren’t approaching intimacy again.

Eddie Muller showed The Big Street on “Noir Alley,” he explained, because though Runyon wasn’t really a noir writer, the pulp-magazine writers whose works formed the basis for most film noir copied Runyon’s unique style of language in making their crooks talk. The story portrays Gloria Lyons as an out-and-out gold-digger, already engaged to her employer, nightclub owner Case Ables (Barton MacLane at his Barton MacLaniest) but openly cruising besotted young rich kid Decatur Reed (William Orr) because he’s both wealthier and cuter than Ables. Half an hour into the movie, Ables gets rough with Gloria and knocks her down a flight of stairs in his club. The injury doesn’t look serious enough on screen to cause much damage, but we’re told that it’s permanently paralyzed her below the waist and put her life in imminent danger. Little Pinks, whose real last name is given as “Pinkard” at one point and “Pinkerton” thereafter, had already lost one busboy job at “Mindy’s” (read: Lindy’s) for breaking his concentration during an eating contest at Mindy’s to rescue Gloria’s dog, the only living creature of any species to whom she shows any genuine affection. Even before her accident Pinks has shown a devotion towards Gloria whose intensity verges on masochism. Afterwards he appoints himself as her caregiver, assisted in that regard by his friend Violette Shumberg (Agnes Moorehead), who’s dating Nicely Nicely Johnson (Eugene Pallette in a marvelously droll performance). When Nicely Nicely and Violette get married and relocate to Florida to open a barbecue restaurant and snack stand (where they sell, among other things, “Amos ‘n’ Andy” candies, a real food item of the time), Pinks is determined to take Gloria there even though he’s broke and has no way to take the trip except by walking. A group of typical Runyon characters, headed by Horsethief (Sam Levene) and “Professor B” (Ray Collins – so two Citizen Kane cast members are in this film!), club together to raise the money for them to take the train, but blow it all on a bad horse-racing bet.

In the scene I particularly remembered from the last time I saw this film, Pinks tries to take the wheelchair-bound Gloria through New York’s Holland Tunnel and gets into an argument with the people at the toll booth because the tunnel is supposed to be reserved for vehicles. “A wheelchair is a vehicle, ain’t it? It’s got wheels!” Pinks insists, and five uniformed officers of the Manhattan Transit Authority get into an argument over whether a wheelchair is a “vehicle.” Meanwhile, a number of truck drivers who are being held up by the argument angrily demand to be let into the tunnel, and one of them offers to pick up Pinks and Gloria and give them a ride as far as Baltimore. The film then turns into an oddball rehash of Fonda’s role in The Grapes of Wrath, as Pinks and Gloria make their way to Florida partly by hitching and partly by walking. When they finally make it to Florida they find that not only have Nicely Nicely and Violette made their way down there, so have most of the rest of the principals. Case Ables has opened a swanky new nightclub in Miami Beach and is also the mastermind of a jewel-thief ring in which the crooks steal valuable jewelry and then offer them back to the insurance companies that wrote the policies on them. Decatur Reed is there spending time on the beach and canoodling with non-disabled girls. Pinks stumbles onto the jewel-thief ring, learns of Ables’ involvement with it, and uses that knowledge to blackmail Ables into hosting a grand private party for Gloria at the club. Some of the Runyonesque crew even kidnap Decatur Reed and force him to attend the party. At the party, Gloria is fêted by guests who think she’s an Eastern European countess, and though she’s seated at a table she gets to sing a reprise of her big song from New York, “Who Knows?” (Ball’s voice was dubbed by Martha Mears, and to the filmmakers’ credit, instead of using the same pre-recording for both performances, they had Mears do separate ones, a self-assured reading for the New York scene pre-disability and a more nervous rendition for the Miami club.)

Ultimately Gloria demands to dance with Pinks, though the scene between them didn’t look convincing as an able-bodied man carrying a disabled woman (I spent decades of my life doing home care for people with disabilities, so I know something about this!). The scene reaches a climax when Gloria demands that Pinks take her up the club stairs to the big bay windows so she can look at the beach. She literally dies in his arms as he’s carrying her up the stairs. The End. The Big Street got great reviews at the time; James Agee said in Time that Ball “was born for the parts Ginger Rogers sweats over” and “tackles her ‘emotional’ role as if it were sirloin and she didn’t care who was looking.” Alas, it was Lucille Ball’s last role at RKO; shortly thereafter she turned down a proffered loanout to 20th Century-Fox and instead decamped to MGM, where her very next film, DuBarry Was a Lady, also cast her as a spoiled-brat gold-digging diva bitch with a proletarian boy (Red Skelton this time) hopelessly infatuated with her. DuBarry Was a Lady was also Ball’s first film in color, and it was for this one that MGM hair stylist Sydney Guilaroff had the idea to dye Ball’s hair flaming red because, as he put it, “Her soul is on fire.” Ball soldiered on at MGM for seven years and spent a lot of time hanging out with Buster Keaton, former MGM star who’d been hired back as a gagman for Red Skelton, and his old director, Edward Sedgwick. Keaton pleaded with the “suits” at MGM to give Ball roles in slapstick comedy, and their attitude was, “He’s just a burned-out old silent-era has-been – what does he know?” Then Ball scored I Love Lucy with Desi Arnaz producing as well as co-starring and became a TV superstar … as a slapstick comedienne.