Entry tags:
Nobody has any right to kill himself for three thousand dollars
Angels Over Broadway (1940) was written, co-produced, and co-directed by Ben Hecht, and it should not have taken me until last night to discover that it's also wonderful.
It is one of the movies that is so gently and specifically itself that I have to be careful how I talk about it lest it sound too much like O. Henry or Damon Runyon or, God forbid, film noir. The scene is a down-pouring night in New York City, the dramatis personae four down-and-out strangers whose fates collide at the modernist glitz of the Pigeon Club, where none of them really belong. Bill O'Brien (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.) is a small-time hustler whose pencil mustache makes promises his furrowed brows have trouble keeping, currently touting for a gangster's all-night poker game while dreaming like a sucker himself of "a seven rolling for me somewhere." Nina Barona (Rita Hayworth) is an equally small-time dancer, as breathily baby-dollish as a red-haired Sugar Kane, moth-tagging the footlights of nightspots with an absurd pride in her rather trashy-sounding specialty, "the slave routine with the chains." Gene Gibbons (Thomas Mitchell) who eight years ago was a happily married, Pulitzer-winning playwright now describes himself, in the wake of three flops and on the verge of divorce, with drunken grandiloquence as "a veteran corpse . . . a fellow cadaver . . . an epitaph over an ashcan." And the mild-mannered catalyst of their mutual entanglement is thousand-yard shlimazl Charles Engle (John Qualen), numbly stumbling toward suicide after embezzling $3000 from his oldest friend to fund his expensive wife's taste in affairs. Mistaking his doomed apathy for absentminded affluence, Bill wants to hook him for the poker game and Nina wants to charm him toward the stage door, but Gene with a magnificently blotto mix of silver-tongued compassion and literary hubris declares the arc of Engle's life dramatically unsatisfying and resolves to script-doctor it: "I'll rewrite your last act." A hotel room full of high-rolling lowlifes should serve as an admirable set-up for peripateia. His chance-met companions can double as spear-carriers and stagehands. "Omnipotence often needs a little support." Thus do our three tarnished angels embark on a night's work of half-cocked, cross-purposes, metatheatrical soul-saving against the odds of their own self-sabotaging natures and the indifferent universe. Or as Nina says when the chips are down, in her little Brooklyn head cold of a voice that all of a sudden doesn't sound quite so easy to brush off, "We're all nickels and dimes . . . Why can't we just once pretend we're big shots? Come on. Let's play it like big shots. Just once."
I love the deliberate, small, almost hopelessness of this plot, the awareness which its characters either embrace or resist that even when they're playing for life or death, it's penny ante. So what if Engle throws himself into the river, if Gene drinks himself into actual corpsehood, if Nina coasts from casting couch to casting couch or Bill goes on shilling for his "percentage"? Will it dim the lights of Mazda Lane so much as a bug-zap? Will it dent a drop of the rain that's been drumming down on their heads all night? At every step of their cockeyed journey, they meet characters just as menial and marginal as themselves, from the grousing proprietor of a late-night five-and-dime (Jimmy Conlin) to the doorman at the 43rd Street Theatre (William Lally) who declaims from Henry VIII to scare off the rats to the dawn-tired cabbie (Billy Wayne) who exits, oblivious to the miracle his three bucks' worth of Broadway cruising helped facilitate, with the rimshot moral, "I ask you, what's a guy living for?" Even the formidable Dutch Enright (Ralph Theodore) isn't the worst the underworld has to offer, though he will do his best to see you dead if you rip off his racket. There are eight million stories in the naked city and none of Angels Over Broadway's even rise to the level of a headline. But we care, deeply and painfully, not because any of these people are so unusually deserving, but because all of them are real, maybe even more real than they believe themselves to be. Bill in his introductory scene performs the none more hardboiled gesture of lighting his cigarette one-handed in the shadow of his fedora and trenchcoat, but the harder he tries to come off as an armor-plated operator, the more he sounds like an ordinary vulnerable human making an ass of himself trying to hide it. Nina's simplicity isn't stupidity, but neither is it innocence, which makes it all the more poignant whenever an edge of world-wistfulness shows through her all-comers patter: "I'm a Russian, you know, but this season everything is Latin, completely Latin." Gene crashes around his own plot like a magnanimous wrecking ball, firing off brilliantly overripe one-liners like "Venus was never an epileptic" and "I no longer have to order drinks—I just attract them," but the scene where he calls home to his wife is so unselfconscious and direct, it cuts deeper than any screwball epigram. Even Engle with his apprehensive loser's face and his hands that shake all the time he's holding the cards with Dutch's boys proves to have a surprise or two up his threadbare sleeve, like actually wanting to live. There may be a topical-political nudge underneath this marshaling of imperfect, necessary resources—when Bill justifies his percentage-player isolationism with current events, claiming that "if you want to find out what happens to nice little guys, don't read books, just read the headlines. What happened to the Poles and the Finns and the Dutch? They're nice little guys. Did they win?" it feels like a memo straight from the anti-Nazi screenwriter that Nina responds boldly, "They will sometime." Mostly, however, the characters feel like themselves, too messy to be anything but human, and that's all we need.
In his autobiography A Child of the Century (1954), Hecht praised his co-director and DP Lee Garmes as "[m]y favorite collaborator in Hollywood . . . Nothing I ever encountered in the movies was as uniquely talented as the eyes of Lee Garmes. I prided myself on being an acute observer, but beside Lee I was almost a blind man. Driving his car at fifty miles an hour he would inquire if I had noticed the girl in the back seat of a car that had passed us, speeding in the opposite direction. What about her, I would ask. Lee would beam, 'We ought to put that in a picture sometime. She was using daisies for cuff links, real daisies.'" A raconteur whatever his profession, Hecht could confect an anecdote with the best of them, but the detail of Garmes' proto-noir cinematography combined with the art direction of Lionel Banks is legitimately stunning. The rain-battered streets glisten with reflections of wet neon sliding off storefront glass and the glossy hoods of cars, beetle-shelled umbrellas and drip-brimmed hats. The Pigeon Club is dressed in a spiky constructivist style that dazzle-camouflages its patrons among skylines even more claustrophobically askew than the nighttime canyons of Manhattan. The river looks as hard-nailed as a coffin, a theater after hours is a natural black box until the stage doorman brings up the lights and suddenly it's another false landscape, this time the snow-capped "Acarnanian Mountains, although there's only one of them." The poker game at the Sunset Hotel affords a gorgeous top-down shot of nested circles of hands and cards and cash, like the oldest established permanent floating by Busby Berkeley, and when it breaks up inevitably into violence, the resulting fracas smacks the camera into Dutch angles all down the hall. A shot down through the wet-misted iron zigzags of a fire escape is simultaneously geometric and dizzying, the three-dimensional equivalent of a hypnotic spiral. Even casual scenes are lit in tight slants and shadows, the same slight but deliberate lean into expressionism as Hecht's slangy, jazzy, hyper-figurative dialogue—"Seven bucks. The last of the Mohicans." I'm not sure there's a location shot in the picture, but it doesn't matter. It doesn't feel like a buzzy Columbia A-picture that confused Harry Cohn so badly it wound up relegated to the bottom half of double bills; it feels like real night, real rain, real good and bad luck in a New York only as unreal as any city gets between sunset and dawn. Whatever else it is, Angels Over Broadway is a movie for night people, in both the circadian and the Jean Shepherd senses. At one point one character asks another for the time and receives the unstudied answer, "One-thirty, that's all."
I didn't expect to treasure this movie when I invited![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch to watch it with me, but I think I might. Nothing else quite reminds me of its tone, unless maybe Val Lewton's The Seventh Victim (1943), admittedly to very different ends; it has the existentialism of noir, but not the destabilization, and despite its crime element it's more poetic realist than hardboiled in the end. I don't need to categorize it. I have finally seen Thomas Mitchell convincingly play a romantic love scene, never mind that it was over the phone. I have seen Douglas Fairbanks Jr. lose a nickel to an old-style pinball machine, the kind that were still a game of chance. I have even seen Hecht himself in an uncredited cameo as a no-good in night court. He got an Oscar nomination for the screenplay, probably should have lost to Charlie Chaplin for The Great Dictator and lost to Preston Sturges for The Great McGinty instead. I found the film in a collection of Rita Hayworth on Criterion, but it is unexpectedly, if a bit fuzzily, available on YouTube. It runs 79 minutes and the sun comes up just when it needs to. This seven brought to you by my night backers at Patreon.
It is one of the movies that is so gently and specifically itself that I have to be careful how I talk about it lest it sound too much like O. Henry or Damon Runyon or, God forbid, film noir. The scene is a down-pouring night in New York City, the dramatis personae four down-and-out strangers whose fates collide at the modernist glitz of the Pigeon Club, where none of them really belong. Bill O'Brien (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.) is a small-time hustler whose pencil mustache makes promises his furrowed brows have trouble keeping, currently touting for a gangster's all-night poker game while dreaming like a sucker himself of "a seven rolling for me somewhere." Nina Barona (Rita Hayworth) is an equally small-time dancer, as breathily baby-dollish as a red-haired Sugar Kane, moth-tagging the footlights of nightspots with an absurd pride in her rather trashy-sounding specialty, "the slave routine with the chains." Gene Gibbons (Thomas Mitchell) who eight years ago was a happily married, Pulitzer-winning playwright now describes himself, in the wake of three flops and on the verge of divorce, with drunken grandiloquence as "a veteran corpse . . . a fellow cadaver . . . an epitaph over an ashcan." And the mild-mannered catalyst of their mutual entanglement is thousand-yard shlimazl Charles Engle (John Qualen), numbly stumbling toward suicide after embezzling $3000 from his oldest friend to fund his expensive wife's taste in affairs. Mistaking his doomed apathy for absentminded affluence, Bill wants to hook him for the poker game and Nina wants to charm him toward the stage door, but Gene with a magnificently blotto mix of silver-tongued compassion and literary hubris declares the arc of Engle's life dramatically unsatisfying and resolves to script-doctor it: "I'll rewrite your last act." A hotel room full of high-rolling lowlifes should serve as an admirable set-up for peripateia. His chance-met companions can double as spear-carriers and stagehands. "Omnipotence often needs a little support." Thus do our three tarnished angels embark on a night's work of half-cocked, cross-purposes, metatheatrical soul-saving against the odds of their own self-sabotaging natures and the indifferent universe. Or as Nina says when the chips are down, in her little Brooklyn head cold of a voice that all of a sudden doesn't sound quite so easy to brush off, "We're all nickels and dimes . . . Why can't we just once pretend we're big shots? Come on. Let's play it like big shots. Just once."
I love the deliberate, small, almost hopelessness of this plot, the awareness which its characters either embrace or resist that even when they're playing for life or death, it's penny ante. So what if Engle throws himself into the river, if Gene drinks himself into actual corpsehood, if Nina coasts from casting couch to casting couch or Bill goes on shilling for his "percentage"? Will it dim the lights of Mazda Lane so much as a bug-zap? Will it dent a drop of the rain that's been drumming down on their heads all night? At every step of their cockeyed journey, they meet characters just as menial and marginal as themselves, from the grousing proprietor of a late-night five-and-dime (Jimmy Conlin) to the doorman at the 43rd Street Theatre (William Lally) who declaims from Henry VIII to scare off the rats to the dawn-tired cabbie (Billy Wayne) who exits, oblivious to the miracle his three bucks' worth of Broadway cruising helped facilitate, with the rimshot moral, "I ask you, what's a guy living for?" Even the formidable Dutch Enright (Ralph Theodore) isn't the worst the underworld has to offer, though he will do his best to see you dead if you rip off his racket. There are eight million stories in the naked city and none of Angels Over Broadway's even rise to the level of a headline. But we care, deeply and painfully, not because any of these people are so unusually deserving, but because all of them are real, maybe even more real than they believe themselves to be. Bill in his introductory scene performs the none more hardboiled gesture of lighting his cigarette one-handed in the shadow of his fedora and trenchcoat, but the harder he tries to come off as an armor-plated operator, the more he sounds like an ordinary vulnerable human making an ass of himself trying to hide it. Nina's simplicity isn't stupidity, but neither is it innocence, which makes it all the more poignant whenever an edge of world-wistfulness shows through her all-comers patter: "I'm a Russian, you know, but this season everything is Latin, completely Latin." Gene crashes around his own plot like a magnanimous wrecking ball, firing off brilliantly overripe one-liners like "Venus was never an epileptic" and "I no longer have to order drinks—I just attract them," but the scene where he calls home to his wife is so unselfconscious and direct, it cuts deeper than any screwball epigram. Even Engle with his apprehensive loser's face and his hands that shake all the time he's holding the cards with Dutch's boys proves to have a surprise or two up his threadbare sleeve, like actually wanting to live. There may be a topical-political nudge underneath this marshaling of imperfect, necessary resources—when Bill justifies his percentage-player isolationism with current events, claiming that "if you want to find out what happens to nice little guys, don't read books, just read the headlines. What happened to the Poles and the Finns and the Dutch? They're nice little guys. Did they win?" it feels like a memo straight from the anti-Nazi screenwriter that Nina responds boldly, "They will sometime." Mostly, however, the characters feel like themselves, too messy to be anything but human, and that's all we need.
In his autobiography A Child of the Century (1954), Hecht praised his co-director and DP Lee Garmes as "[m]y favorite collaborator in Hollywood . . . Nothing I ever encountered in the movies was as uniquely talented as the eyes of Lee Garmes. I prided myself on being an acute observer, but beside Lee I was almost a blind man. Driving his car at fifty miles an hour he would inquire if I had noticed the girl in the back seat of a car that had passed us, speeding in the opposite direction. What about her, I would ask. Lee would beam, 'We ought to put that in a picture sometime. She was using daisies for cuff links, real daisies.'" A raconteur whatever his profession, Hecht could confect an anecdote with the best of them, but the detail of Garmes' proto-noir cinematography combined with the art direction of Lionel Banks is legitimately stunning. The rain-battered streets glisten with reflections of wet neon sliding off storefront glass and the glossy hoods of cars, beetle-shelled umbrellas and drip-brimmed hats. The Pigeon Club is dressed in a spiky constructivist style that dazzle-camouflages its patrons among skylines even more claustrophobically askew than the nighttime canyons of Manhattan. The river looks as hard-nailed as a coffin, a theater after hours is a natural black box until the stage doorman brings up the lights and suddenly it's another false landscape, this time the snow-capped "Acarnanian Mountains, although there's only one of them." The poker game at the Sunset Hotel affords a gorgeous top-down shot of nested circles of hands and cards and cash, like the oldest established permanent floating by Busby Berkeley, and when it breaks up inevitably into violence, the resulting fracas smacks the camera into Dutch angles all down the hall. A shot down through the wet-misted iron zigzags of a fire escape is simultaneously geometric and dizzying, the three-dimensional equivalent of a hypnotic spiral. Even casual scenes are lit in tight slants and shadows, the same slight but deliberate lean into expressionism as Hecht's slangy, jazzy, hyper-figurative dialogue—"Seven bucks. The last of the Mohicans." I'm not sure there's a location shot in the picture, but it doesn't matter. It doesn't feel like a buzzy Columbia A-picture that confused Harry Cohn so badly it wound up relegated to the bottom half of double bills; it feels like real night, real rain, real good and bad luck in a New York only as unreal as any city gets between sunset and dawn. Whatever else it is, Angels Over Broadway is a movie for night people, in both the circadian and the Jean Shepherd senses. At one point one character asks another for the time and receives the unstudied answer, "One-thirty, that's all."
I didn't expect to treasure this movie when I invited
spatch to watch it with me, but I think I might. Nothing else quite reminds me of its tone, unless maybe Val Lewton's The Seventh Victim (1943), admittedly to very different ends; it has the existentialism of noir, but not the destabilization, and despite its crime element it's more poetic realist than hardboiled in the end. I don't need to categorize it. I have finally seen Thomas Mitchell convincingly play a romantic love scene, never mind that it was over the phone. I have seen Douglas Fairbanks Jr. lose a nickel to an old-style pinball machine, the kind that were still a game of chance. I have even seen Hecht himself in an uncredited cameo as a no-good in night court. He got an Oscar nomination for the screenplay, probably should have lost to Charlie Chaplin for The Great Dictator and lost to Preston Sturges for The Great McGinty instead. I found the film in a collection of Rita Hayworth on Criterion, but it is unexpectedly, if a bit fuzzily, available on YouTube. It runs 79 minutes and the sun comes up just when it needs to. This seven brought to you by my night backers at Patreon.
no subject
no subject
You're welcome! I had not heard of it before it turned up on Criterion.
no subject
no subject
I feel like every time I watch a movie now where Garmes did the cinematography, I have to see if he snuck her in somewhere.
no subject
no subject
Thank you! The movie made an impression on me.
no subject
no subject
I shut Tiny Wittgenstein in my desk drawer! Thanks!
no subject
no subject
against the odds of their own self-sabotaging natures and the indifferent universe **please pull a win from this; I will take it as a personal sign**
At every step of their cockeyed journey, they meet characters just as menial and marginal as themselves ... I think I'm falling in love. I have to see this
all of them are real, maybe even more real than they believe themselves to be --beautiful
--The story about Lee and the girl using daisies as cufflinks!
Yay for fuzzy-on-Youtube! Thank you for this.
no subject
I realize I am writing lately about the kind of movies that feel almost more like sympathetic magic than entertainment, but they seem to be the ones that really matter to me right now. If so, let's hope they work.
--beautiful
So many people don't believe or recognize their own reality. It's important to me.
--The story about Lee and the girl using daisies as cufflinks!
I really hope her avatar ended up in a movie somewhere.
Yay for fuzzy-on-Youtube! Thank you for this.
You're welcome! I was really glad to discover this movie. I hope it is the same for you.
no subject
no subject
I'm so glad!
*hugs*