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Welcome to our family of phonies
Just around the two-thirds mark of Edgar G. Ulmer's Runyonesque wartime farce My Son, the Hero (1943), a character makes eye contact with the fourth wall and offers a sigh of commiseration: "What a screwy picture!" He's not wrong, but I loved it anyway. It is a silly, sweet, morale-boosting B-picture turned out by Producers Releasing Corporation for less than half the time and budget of Detour (1945), but it puts several of my favorite bit players together in the same plot and gives them some nice lines to throw back and forth and the whole thing lasts 65 minutes, so you can hardly complain about not getting value for your money, especially if you watch it for free on the internet.
The title sounds like Allan Sherman, but the plot is pure Lady for a Day, with Roscoe Karns in the rare starring role of Big Time Morgan, a Hollywood hustler currently managing glass-jawed prizefighter Kid Slug Rosenthal ("Slapsie" Maxie Rosenbloom) and making absolutely bupkes from him even in fixed fights, mostly because Big Time, despite his expansive aspirations and gift of the rapid-fire gab, has never met the dollar he couldn't immediately lose on blackjack or the ponies, leaving nothing over for Kid Slug's dreamed-of steak dinners or the bill for the barely furnished SRO they share with Tony (Luis Alberni), an Italian ex-pug of obscure employment but definite opinions, such as "Excuse me, please, I think you are all crazy." With his history of coloring the facts until they've gone ultraviolet, Big Time meets with some skepticism when he goes into a tizzy of pride over a picture in the paper, but a telegram arriving later that night—and the reporters who crash the shabby hotel the next morning—bears him out. No joke, the decorated war correspondent Michael Morgan (Joseph Allen, Jr.) really is Big Time's son from his short-lived marriage to a Philadelphia socialite. He's coming through town on a war bonds drive and he wants to see his father. Big Time is overjoyed for just as long as it takes him to remember that, in the years since the divorce, he's lied himself an entire glamorous life so as not to show up badly in his absent son's eyes. "I'm supposed to be rolling in dough . . . I've got a mansion, I've got a rich wife, a beautiful stepdaughter, and servants!" Having none of these things and no fast, cheap, obvious way to get them inside of twenty-four hours, he turns in a moment of inspiration to Kid Slug's sometime wife Gert (Patsy Kelly), a force of fast talking in her own right.
(Hold up here a minute if you have never seen Patsy Kelly, one of the wisecracking goddesses of old Hollywood. She came up through vaudeville and Broadway as a dancer, her mother having sent her for lessons in an utterly pointless attempt to gloss over her daughter's tomboy edges; she started her film career in two-reeler comedy shorts with Thelma Todd and showed off her brassy, sassy, salty persona in close to two dozen features through the '30's and early '40's. Like Karns, she was more often a character type than a lead, usually playing the heroine's best friend and/or maid—the Colombina of the commedia, the street-smart trickster with a pin for every pretension and a voice of unadulterated Brooklyn gravel to stick it in with. Offscreen, she was an outspoken lesbian in the heyday of the Production Code, brash, butch, and at one point living openly with fellow actress Wilma Cox, all of which makes for heroic queer history and contributed in no small part to her abrupt and seventeen-year hiatus from film, starting the same year My Son, the Hero was released. I didn't even remember until I had to double-check a fact for this paragraph that I had seen her years before in Rosemary's Baby (1968) and Freaky Friday (1970). She has memorable turns in the freewheeling weirdness of Pigskin Parade (1936)1 and the family comedy of Merrily We Live (1938). I am always happy to see her name in the credits of a movie even when she's just onscreen for five minutes to roll her eyes at somebody. She's top-billed here and it isn't wasted.)
Good as her word, Gert phones up a Beverly Hills acquaintance with "a heart like a tough custard" and secures his mansion for the weekend, then sets about organizing the stumblebum cast into a plausible facsimile of the high life they have only observed from outside. European Tony will serve as majordomo of the Morgan residence, bringing his girlfriend Rosita (Elvira Curci) along as the cook on condition that she doesn't have to wash the dishes; Nicodemus (Nick Stewart) has access to an appropriately swanky car, so he gets tapped to play chauffeur while his girlfriend Lambie (Jeni Le Gon) poses as the maid. Gert herself makes an impeccably nouveau riche second wife—"Why, Big Time, this is so sudden!"—and shy ex-cigarette girl Nancy (Lois Collier) completes the portrait as the beautiful stepdaughter. Introducing Michael, it looks like the only hiccups in the masquerade are going to be the instant mutual attraction of the supposed step-siblings and maybe Kid Slug's absentminded instinct to steal the silver. With the arrival of two unplanned players, however, the grift of a lifetime suddenly starts to look like the booby trap of the century: Cynthia Morgan (Joan Blair) may be an elegant society blonde who needs the slang translated in questions like "Is that the McCoy?" and "Who bounced for that?", but she's nobody's fool when it comes to her still-smitten ex-husband, and Linda Duncan (Carol Hughes), the haughty, Vassar-polished daughter of the real homeowner, will blow the gaff outright if she isn't allowed to play—she has her sights set on a war hero and handsome Michael Morgan, even if he's already interested in someone else, will do. Throw in some free-floating millions and a horse named My Son and the odds for our heroes start to look as bad as the rest of Big Time's bets. "Lady Fortune knocks but once, and I got good hearing!" he boasts to Kid Slug, but for the first time he looks like his spiel isn't convincing either one of them. "You know this is a business deal, don't you?" he says uncomfortably, his fingers already spinning the combination on the wall safe. "Other men have business deals, don't they? Well, I'm going to have one." He writes a very neat hand for the IOU.
The charade naturally comes to a head at a costume party organized in Michael's honor,2 but I appreciate that the story never collapses into schmaltz or comedy of embarrassment. It helps that, while the outcome of the picture is predictable, the specifics are pleasantly varied. Gert and Cynthia, for example, far from fighting over Big Time or personifying some kind of unconquerable class divide, bond immediately over Nicodemus' best guess at Cointreau, swap beauty tips for slang lessons, and join forces in encouraging a dispirited Nancy to stick out the weekend instead of abandoning Michael to the confidently predatory Linda—the Philadelphia matron becomes one of the Hollywood pretenders, signaling her allegiance by remembering to call her ex-husband "Big Time" instead of his real name, the spit-take-producing "Percy." The love angle reassures the audience that Michael will be just as happy to learn that his stepsister is no such thing; even better, there are implications that he may have had his suspicions from the start. In fact, though none of the other characters ever find out, Michael and Nancy both overhear the conversation between Cynthia and Big Time that spills all the beans: the imposture, the truth, even the fact that Big Time has staked money that isn't even slightly his on a horse that never even left the post. They come away quietly and say nothing when an elated Big Time, whose strange luck has come through at last, claps the missing money into his son's hand along with the requisite quarter million for the last of the war bonds and takes the whole ever-loving gang with him to the airport to see off their son. The kids know they're loved; the adults know they've done good. Nobody's fooling anybody about the things that really matter. Everything else is spur-of-the-moment and seat-of-the-pants. Big Time's moniker may ring of wistful irony, but even the rich people whose lives he and his friends are temporarily wearing have troubles and pretenses of their own. The borrowed house comes "with all the fixings—swimming pool, mortgages, back taxes, everything." Nicodemus successfully procures a friend-of-a-friend's pre-war Rolls-Royce, but warns as he drives, "We better be kind of careful with this heap. Samson was telling me that the insurance has, um, collapsed." A couple at the costume party preen themselves on dressing as "the only original Martha and George Washington" only to watch three more identical sets of George and Martha walk through the door—it is an obviously storebought costume, patriotically themed in keeping with wartime morale.3 As Big Time says happily toward the end of the picture, "I've been lying from A to Z, that's all. The whole thing has been put together by mirrors and anybody could kick it down." He could be talking about the production values as well as the plot. Any moving shot of the outdoors is stock footage. The one exterior view of the mansion is played by a blown-up still photograph and any room that the camera can't track through is bound to play two or three different locations over the course of the film. As in Detour, the characters move through a world of false fronts and negotiable identities, only where the later film will use its flimsiness to suggest the unreality of a nightmare, here it means a chance to get away with a happy ending.
And because Roscoe Karns is one of my favorite character actors, it is nice to see him getting, even in a no-budget Poverty Row B-picture, a chance to show off his skills at center stage. The script by Ulmer and Doris Malloy gives him plenty of flim-flam lines (eager to impress his son on their first adult meeting, Big Time breezily declares that he's "making money hand over fist. I've invented a new kind of a gadget that will probably revolutionize the entire war scene—a gunsight, you know what I mean," to which Michael responds tactfully, "Mother said you were quite inventive"), but also quieter moments with his makeshift family and his conscience, which is erratic but in about the same right place as his heart. He's older here than in any other role I've seen; he still moves and talks at double-time from anyone else around him who isn't Patsy Kelly, but he might be ready to stop living hand to daydream, like Coyote with solid air under his feet so long as he doesn't look down. The redemption arc requires it, but the script doesn't lay the moral on too thick. When the conspirators are sitting around their plush drawing room and Big Time bursts out with a self-accusing condemnation of "chasing rainbows" and living like "phonies" instead of real people, Tony kills the melodrama with a poker-faced "Thank you," solemnly plunking another cube of sugar in his tea. Big Time is a real person, though; he really loves his son, doesn't want to disappoint him, has trouble resisting the lure of the shortcut, and sums up his feelings for his ex-wife with the adorable hyperbole "The Statue of Liberty couldn't carry my torch." They're hiding out from their own costume party at the time, letting their masks fall. He doesn't quite get to turn his tall tales into the real thing, but the important parts stay.
Halloween is almost over, so I should finish up, go downstairs, blow out the pumpkins, feed the cats. If the internet is an accurate reflection, this particular story of masks and faces appears to be almost totally obscure despite being in the public domain, but I don't think it deserves it. It has character faces, good double-talk, and some bits of business which I hope to God were improvised, because I can't imagine anyone scripting the scene in which Kid Slug, in the background of some other characters' conversation, can be seen placidly and without comment shaving off his arm hair. Somehow I just noticed that Ulmer has co-directing credit on Peretz Hirshbein's Green Fields (גרינע פעלדער, 1937), so I suppose I'll have to follow him into Yiddish film next. This carnival brought to you by my creative backers at Patreon.
1. I keep trying to describe this movie to people and I always just end up linking its musical numbers, because the plot really doesn't matter and any attempt to synopsize it will end up getting bogged down in watermelon-throwing, harmonica-playing, and the distressingly catchy Red-baiting of the collegiate glee club that convinces Elisha Cook, Jr. to throw a brick through a bank window. Kelly gets second billing as the wife of the football coach played by Jack Haley, whose no-name agricultural college team has just been accidentally invited to play Yale. Let it surprise no one that she knows more about the game than her husband does.
2. If nothing else, I do not regret this movie because it gave me the sight of Patsy Kelly smoking a cigarette in near-full plate armor; she strikes the match on her breastplate. "Be careful," Lambie scolds her, "you'll scratch up the chassis!" Kid Slug gives her the nicest compliment he can think of: "The way you look now, any junk dealer in town'd give you twenty-five dollars, right on the hoof."
3. My Son, the Hero was filmed in December 1942 and the wartime setting comes out in some interesting touches. Early on, Kid Slug protests sharing a couch with an "enemy alien," at which Tony rounds on him furiously: "You see? Every time I do something he does not like, he calls me enemy aliens! Look here. I come here in this country 1929 with Primo Carnera. I stay in this country. I love America. I hate Benny Deluxe!" The mission for which Michael won his medal is not named directly at first, but it's the Doolittle Raid—when asked how he got to Tokyo, he says with the air of an in-joke, "It's no secret at all. We left from and returned to—Shangri-La." In hindsight the title should be read with a little tongue in cheek; nobody even needs to drop a hat to start Big Time kvelling over his son, but he can't shake the feeling that the kid may have gone just a little overboard. "All my life I've been writing to Michael asking him to be a right guy so I could be proud of him. And the kid believes me! He turns into a hero!"
The title sounds like Allan Sherman, but the plot is pure Lady for a Day, with Roscoe Karns in the rare starring role of Big Time Morgan, a Hollywood hustler currently managing glass-jawed prizefighter Kid Slug Rosenthal ("Slapsie" Maxie Rosenbloom) and making absolutely bupkes from him even in fixed fights, mostly because Big Time, despite his expansive aspirations and gift of the rapid-fire gab, has never met the dollar he couldn't immediately lose on blackjack or the ponies, leaving nothing over for Kid Slug's dreamed-of steak dinners or the bill for the barely furnished SRO they share with Tony (Luis Alberni), an Italian ex-pug of obscure employment but definite opinions, such as "Excuse me, please, I think you are all crazy." With his history of coloring the facts until they've gone ultraviolet, Big Time meets with some skepticism when he goes into a tizzy of pride over a picture in the paper, but a telegram arriving later that night—and the reporters who crash the shabby hotel the next morning—bears him out. No joke, the decorated war correspondent Michael Morgan (Joseph Allen, Jr.) really is Big Time's son from his short-lived marriage to a Philadelphia socialite. He's coming through town on a war bonds drive and he wants to see his father. Big Time is overjoyed for just as long as it takes him to remember that, in the years since the divorce, he's lied himself an entire glamorous life so as not to show up badly in his absent son's eyes. "I'm supposed to be rolling in dough . . . I've got a mansion, I've got a rich wife, a beautiful stepdaughter, and servants!" Having none of these things and no fast, cheap, obvious way to get them inside of twenty-four hours, he turns in a moment of inspiration to Kid Slug's sometime wife Gert (Patsy Kelly), a force of fast talking in her own right.
(Hold up here a minute if you have never seen Patsy Kelly, one of the wisecracking goddesses of old Hollywood. She came up through vaudeville and Broadway as a dancer, her mother having sent her for lessons in an utterly pointless attempt to gloss over her daughter's tomboy edges; she started her film career in two-reeler comedy shorts with Thelma Todd and showed off her brassy, sassy, salty persona in close to two dozen features through the '30's and early '40's. Like Karns, she was more often a character type than a lead, usually playing the heroine's best friend and/or maid—the Colombina of the commedia, the street-smart trickster with a pin for every pretension and a voice of unadulterated Brooklyn gravel to stick it in with. Offscreen, she was an outspoken lesbian in the heyday of the Production Code, brash, butch, and at one point living openly with fellow actress Wilma Cox, all of which makes for heroic queer history and contributed in no small part to her abrupt and seventeen-year hiatus from film, starting the same year My Son, the Hero was released. I didn't even remember until I had to double-check a fact for this paragraph that I had seen her years before in Rosemary's Baby (1968) and Freaky Friday (1970). She has memorable turns in the freewheeling weirdness of Pigskin Parade (1936)1 and the family comedy of Merrily We Live (1938). I am always happy to see her name in the credits of a movie even when she's just onscreen for five minutes to roll her eyes at somebody. She's top-billed here and it isn't wasted.)
Good as her word, Gert phones up a Beverly Hills acquaintance with "a heart like a tough custard" and secures his mansion for the weekend, then sets about organizing the stumblebum cast into a plausible facsimile of the high life they have only observed from outside. European Tony will serve as majordomo of the Morgan residence, bringing his girlfriend Rosita (Elvira Curci) along as the cook on condition that she doesn't have to wash the dishes; Nicodemus (Nick Stewart) has access to an appropriately swanky car, so he gets tapped to play chauffeur while his girlfriend Lambie (Jeni Le Gon) poses as the maid. Gert herself makes an impeccably nouveau riche second wife—"Why, Big Time, this is so sudden!"—and shy ex-cigarette girl Nancy (Lois Collier) completes the portrait as the beautiful stepdaughter. Introducing Michael, it looks like the only hiccups in the masquerade are going to be the instant mutual attraction of the supposed step-siblings and maybe Kid Slug's absentminded instinct to steal the silver. With the arrival of two unplanned players, however, the grift of a lifetime suddenly starts to look like the booby trap of the century: Cynthia Morgan (Joan Blair) may be an elegant society blonde who needs the slang translated in questions like "Is that the McCoy?" and "Who bounced for that?", but she's nobody's fool when it comes to her still-smitten ex-husband, and Linda Duncan (Carol Hughes), the haughty, Vassar-polished daughter of the real homeowner, will blow the gaff outright if she isn't allowed to play—she has her sights set on a war hero and handsome Michael Morgan, even if he's already interested in someone else, will do. Throw in some free-floating millions and a horse named My Son and the odds for our heroes start to look as bad as the rest of Big Time's bets. "Lady Fortune knocks but once, and I got good hearing!" he boasts to Kid Slug, but for the first time he looks like his spiel isn't convincing either one of them. "You know this is a business deal, don't you?" he says uncomfortably, his fingers already spinning the combination on the wall safe. "Other men have business deals, don't they? Well, I'm going to have one." He writes a very neat hand for the IOU.
The charade naturally comes to a head at a costume party organized in Michael's honor,2 but I appreciate that the story never collapses into schmaltz or comedy of embarrassment. It helps that, while the outcome of the picture is predictable, the specifics are pleasantly varied. Gert and Cynthia, for example, far from fighting over Big Time or personifying some kind of unconquerable class divide, bond immediately over Nicodemus' best guess at Cointreau, swap beauty tips for slang lessons, and join forces in encouraging a dispirited Nancy to stick out the weekend instead of abandoning Michael to the confidently predatory Linda—the Philadelphia matron becomes one of the Hollywood pretenders, signaling her allegiance by remembering to call her ex-husband "Big Time" instead of his real name, the spit-take-producing "Percy." The love angle reassures the audience that Michael will be just as happy to learn that his stepsister is no such thing; even better, there are implications that he may have had his suspicions from the start. In fact, though none of the other characters ever find out, Michael and Nancy both overhear the conversation between Cynthia and Big Time that spills all the beans: the imposture, the truth, even the fact that Big Time has staked money that isn't even slightly his on a horse that never even left the post. They come away quietly and say nothing when an elated Big Time, whose strange luck has come through at last, claps the missing money into his son's hand along with the requisite quarter million for the last of the war bonds and takes the whole ever-loving gang with him to the airport to see off their son. The kids know they're loved; the adults know they've done good. Nobody's fooling anybody about the things that really matter. Everything else is spur-of-the-moment and seat-of-the-pants. Big Time's moniker may ring of wistful irony, but even the rich people whose lives he and his friends are temporarily wearing have troubles and pretenses of their own. The borrowed house comes "with all the fixings—swimming pool, mortgages, back taxes, everything." Nicodemus successfully procures a friend-of-a-friend's pre-war Rolls-Royce, but warns as he drives, "We better be kind of careful with this heap. Samson was telling me that the insurance has, um, collapsed." A couple at the costume party preen themselves on dressing as "the only original Martha and George Washington" only to watch three more identical sets of George and Martha walk through the door—it is an obviously storebought costume, patriotically themed in keeping with wartime morale.3 As Big Time says happily toward the end of the picture, "I've been lying from A to Z, that's all. The whole thing has been put together by mirrors and anybody could kick it down." He could be talking about the production values as well as the plot. Any moving shot of the outdoors is stock footage. The one exterior view of the mansion is played by a blown-up still photograph and any room that the camera can't track through is bound to play two or three different locations over the course of the film. As in Detour, the characters move through a world of false fronts and negotiable identities, only where the later film will use its flimsiness to suggest the unreality of a nightmare, here it means a chance to get away with a happy ending.
And because Roscoe Karns is one of my favorite character actors, it is nice to see him getting, even in a no-budget Poverty Row B-picture, a chance to show off his skills at center stage. The script by Ulmer and Doris Malloy gives him plenty of flim-flam lines (eager to impress his son on their first adult meeting, Big Time breezily declares that he's "making money hand over fist. I've invented a new kind of a gadget that will probably revolutionize the entire war scene—a gunsight, you know what I mean," to which Michael responds tactfully, "Mother said you were quite inventive"), but also quieter moments with his makeshift family and his conscience, which is erratic but in about the same right place as his heart. He's older here than in any other role I've seen; he still moves and talks at double-time from anyone else around him who isn't Patsy Kelly, but he might be ready to stop living hand to daydream, like Coyote with solid air under his feet so long as he doesn't look down. The redemption arc requires it, but the script doesn't lay the moral on too thick. When the conspirators are sitting around their plush drawing room and Big Time bursts out with a self-accusing condemnation of "chasing rainbows" and living like "phonies" instead of real people, Tony kills the melodrama with a poker-faced "Thank you," solemnly plunking another cube of sugar in his tea. Big Time is a real person, though; he really loves his son, doesn't want to disappoint him, has trouble resisting the lure of the shortcut, and sums up his feelings for his ex-wife with the adorable hyperbole "The Statue of Liberty couldn't carry my torch." They're hiding out from their own costume party at the time, letting their masks fall. He doesn't quite get to turn his tall tales into the real thing, but the important parts stay.
Halloween is almost over, so I should finish up, go downstairs, blow out the pumpkins, feed the cats. If the internet is an accurate reflection, this particular story of masks and faces appears to be almost totally obscure despite being in the public domain, but I don't think it deserves it. It has character faces, good double-talk, and some bits of business which I hope to God were improvised, because I can't imagine anyone scripting the scene in which Kid Slug, in the background of some other characters' conversation, can be seen placidly and without comment shaving off his arm hair. Somehow I just noticed that Ulmer has co-directing credit on Peretz Hirshbein's Green Fields (גרינע פעלדער, 1937), so I suppose I'll have to follow him into Yiddish film next. This carnival brought to you by my creative backers at Patreon.
1. I keep trying to describe this movie to people and I always just end up linking its musical numbers, because the plot really doesn't matter and any attempt to synopsize it will end up getting bogged down in watermelon-throwing, harmonica-playing, and the distressingly catchy Red-baiting of the collegiate glee club that convinces Elisha Cook, Jr. to throw a brick through a bank window. Kelly gets second billing as the wife of the football coach played by Jack Haley, whose no-name agricultural college team has just been accidentally invited to play Yale. Let it surprise no one that she knows more about the game than her husband does.
2. If nothing else, I do not regret this movie because it gave me the sight of Patsy Kelly smoking a cigarette in near-full plate armor; she strikes the match on her breastplate. "Be careful," Lambie scolds her, "you'll scratch up the chassis!" Kid Slug gives her the nicest compliment he can think of: "The way you look now, any junk dealer in town'd give you twenty-five dollars, right on the hoof."
3. My Son, the Hero was filmed in December 1942 and the wartime setting comes out in some interesting touches. Early on, Kid Slug protests sharing a couch with an "enemy alien," at which Tony rounds on him furiously: "You see? Every time I do something he does not like, he calls me enemy aliens! Look here. I come here in this country 1929 with Primo Carnera. I stay in this country. I love America. I hate Benny Deluxe!" The mission for which Michael won his medal is not named directly at first, but it's the Doolittle Raid—when asked how he got to Tokyo, he says with the air of an in-joke, "It's no secret at all. We left from and returned to—Shangri-La." In hindsight the title should be read with a little tongue in cheek; nobody even needs to drop a hat to start Big Time kvelling over his son, but he can't shake the feeling that the kid may have gone just a little overboard. "All my life I've been writing to Michael asking him to be a right guy so I could be proud of him. And the kid believes me! He turns into a hero!"
no subject
Were Italians actually interned as enemy aliens during WW2 in the US?
(The Doolittle Raid is named, by the way - at least, the woman who donates the two thousand dollars says "You were with Doolittle over Tokyo" and the hero replies "We had a very nice trip".)
no subject
That's a nice way of describing it. I'm glad you enjoyed it!
Were Italians actually interned as enemy aliens during WW2 in the US?
I believe some were, although the numbers were much higher for German-Americans and especially Japanese-Americans. Anyone who was an Italian national living in the U.S. at the outbreak of the war would have been legally classifiable as an enemy alien.
(The Doolittle Raid is named, by the way - at least, the woman who donates the two thousand dollars says "You were with Doolittle over Tokyo" and the hero replies "We had a very nice trip".)
Thanks for the correction! I'll update the post.
no subject
no subject
Yes!
I don't know that I'd make a case for My Son, the Hero as one of the jewels of Ulmer's career, but it's slight and sweet and I just liked it a lot. Sometimes that is all you want from a movie, even for Halloween.