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It's easy to have ethics when you're ahead of the game
Any Number Can Play (1949) is not a film noir. It is not a heist movie. It is not even a crime picture except in the technicalities of its setting. Contrary to any of my expectations when I dialed it up, it is a drama, straight, hold the melo. It just wouldn't play without a casino.
As if to make up for all the genres it's missing out on, the screenplay adapted by Richard Brooks from the 1945 novel by Edward Harris Heth concentrates the action into one Aristotelian night in the life of Clark Gable's Charley Kyng, a professional gambler and successful proprietor of his own establishment faced with a three-way collision of stressors to which an early retirement would seem the obvious solution if he weren't so reluctant to take it. Like any legitimate flannel drone, he has spent the last fifteen years arguably more wedded to his job than to Alexis Smith's Lon, so much so that although an easy chemistry still simmers between them, she has quietly redecorated a room in the basement of their house in the suburbs into a memory palace of the cold-water flat they occupied as Depression-era newlyweds before his legendary hand of spades changed their fortunes in '34. All parents are mortally embarrassing to their teenagers, but a father in a less colorful line of work wouldn't leave Darryl Hickman's Paul Kyng so open to bullying—on prom night, no less—over the stigma of "[his] old man's clip joint." A high-powered executive, however, might still receive the diagnosis of angina for which Charley is recommended to knock off the smokes and booze and the nightly roller coaster of riding herd on the poker and the ponies and the tables of craps and blackjack and the slot machines and the high rollers and low company attracted by the dream of luck on tap at Charley's: "What you're saying is that if I give up living, I'll live." He should know better than anyone that the house always wins, but he doesn't want to quit while he's on top; no gambler ever does. The roulette wheel rattles down and Charley's slacker of a brother-in-law has got himself in dutch with some goons who'll get him out if he helps them crook the house; the stickman's patter floats over the click of chips and a smiling old shark pockets deep in oil money announces his intention to break the bank. "What do they prove with dice?" the kid who has spent most of his life trying to know as little as possible about his father's business suddenly needs to find out. The answer he gets is the only riddle there is: "Maybe themselves."
Any Number Can Play was a rare non-musical production of the Freed unit and I admit to feeling a little sorry just because a pulpier treatment is tantalizing to imagine, but despite the encumbrances of its budget, a neat percentage of the story evades the well-known gloss of MGM. It's almost pre-Code in the matter-of-factness with which it treats gambling as a business, especially since the film is set expressly not in Las Vegas, the sole legal location for casinos rather than racetracks or lotteries in the United States in 1949—the rain-shaken streets of its carefully unnamed city are Midwestern by implication, thus accounting for the casual inference of payola when Charley jokes about never actually being invited to the policeman's ball he buys a thousand dollars in tickets every year to. We understand from the same conversation that he doesn't cheat on his income tax and that there are contingencies with names like Manzetti for collecting on checks that bounce. The integrity with which he manages his borderline business differentiates him from a gangster made good, except in the eyes of his son. To Paul already struggling in the shadow of his sporting father, there's nothing estimable about belonging to "the notorious Kyng family." His alienation bewilders Charley, who sees no difference between the casino with his name on it and any other self-made American success: "I take a few bucks, see—me, a nobody—and run it into a bundle in the roughest, toughest race of them all where you don't get any second guesses. I build a legit business, a reputation. Nobody can point a finger at Charley Kyng and say he didn't pay off, nobody can say they didn't get a fair shake. Me, who couldn't spit in the same ocean with some people! Now they're proud to know me. I've built a place where I'm as good as anybody. Better." The most interesting thing about this speech is that the film backs it up. It isn't the boast of a charismatic antihero right before Code-mandated Fortune swings her wheel downward and his empire of chance, glamorous, but sin-gotten, with it. One of the best sequences in the picture is the very first because it's nothing more than a crisp, low-key précis of opening a casino for the night, employees drifting in at quarter to six to shave and eat night-shift breakfast, brush the felt of the tables and pour the bowls of peanuts for the bar and set up the long racks of chips. The last tracks are closing on the West Coast, the restaurant at the front of the house filling up. Not much action goes on early in the evening and even when it begins to filter in, it's just people, not the personifications of a morality play. We meet some hustlers, some losers, one first-timer who actually takes his winnings and goes home. By the time Charley's future is riding on the line of a climactic game of craps, it's even more gripping because it doesn't feel Hollywood-rigged: it would be dramatically apt for him to end the night cleaned out into ironic retirement, but it's just as feasible that he might make one more eight the hard way and stay on top. The radio switched on by Lon in the domestic sphere supposedly as separate from the cards and bones that fund it as an upstairs-downstairs by Sholem Asch is hard-selling a call-in contest just so we don't miss how the literal air of consumer culture is shot through with the lure of the jackpot: "Yes, sir, maid and butler service for one full year! A two-seated aeroplane! Enough frozen food for two long years! And tonight we're adding fifty-two weeks of free service at your favorite hairdresser or barber . . . Are you the lucky one? All right! All you have to do is to guess the name of . . ." A noir would be bitterer about it. It's just as bracing in its own way that Any Number Can Play assumes we already know.
The other benefit of MGM, aside from the long-lined, late-night cinematography of Harold Rosson that excels at cruising the spaces of the casino like an eddy of cigarette smoke, is its deep bench of contract players and poaching rights, whence a stacked cast of character turns such as Barry Sullivan's Tycoon, the right-hand man who takes off his tortoiseshell horn-rims to fire a doubting croupier with two discreet jabs to the solar plexus, or Caleb Peterson's Sleigh, the doorman who gets one of the best kiss-off lines of the night refusing the racist nickname "George." It's marvelous to see Frank Morgan cast against type as shrewd high-stakes heavyweight Jim Kurstyn, jovially dominating the tables until every other game has fallen off to watch him run the house out of chips; ditto Lewis Stone as the nearly derelict Ben Snelerr, the cautionary specter of the big time reduced to pawning his dead wife's heirlooms for one last fling with Lady Luck. Richard Rober and William Conrad make a persuasively crummy double act as the hoods with an eye for a lucky break and Marjorie Rambeau steals her every scene as Sarah Calbern, the broad-beamed society dowager who flirts and gambles as dashingly as the aging gallant she is and snaps down the phone to her lawyer after midnight, "I am not kidnapped and I've never been drunk in my life. I happen to be in a high-class crap game!" It is ultimately the script's fault that the domestic scenes are the weakest in the picture until they cross streams with the action downtown, but it doesn't help that the one-scene wonder of Mary Astor as an old almost-flame of Charley's inevitably conjures the AU where she played Lon. Smith gets better as the screenplay lets her off her decorative, protected leash, but Hickman frustratingly seems to have been cast more for his resemblance to Gable than any ability to convince as an awkward, prudish, not unsalvageable adolescent. Wendell Corey, on the other hand, is turning out not just a shape-changer but an actor who can put a part over without vanity, which is just as well because as Robbie Elcott he has grounds for absolutely none. He gets a triple threat of a no-good introduction: sponging off his brother-in-law, whining at his wife, and on the hook for $2000 to the kind of gentlemen who collect in arms and legs. His sharp face is hardly anything but spooked and peevish, his nasal, resentful mumble of a voice brightens only with opportunism or weak-willed relief. He's just a complete failed person, incapable of making an exit with either apology or dignity—at a crucial moment of solidarity in the casino, Robbie singularly bolts to save his own skin. His wife sums him up with withering concision: "Robbie's a small-time gambler. He's a small-time cheat and a small-time man. He never does anything good enough for me to love him and nothing bad enough for me to leave him." Casting Alice Elcott with the brittle peroxide of Audrey Totter is shorthand genius, since even underused she is fabulously acid; pairing her with Corey is almost a mistake, since it suggests the noir they aren't starring in. Get me a time machine and a line to Hal Wallis. As for Gable, I have curiously less experience of him than of other Hollywood luminaries of his stature and generation, but I like seeing him at human-size, deliberately underlined as such by the plot. The $20,000 to open his own place really did come from an all-night no-holds-barred poker game whose winning hand is still framed on his desk, but his famous trick of flipping a playing card over a four-story building is revealed by his wife as a delightful bit of chicanery dependent on afternoon updrafts. Even more than the complication of a heart condition, it contributes to the tension of the final crapshoot because we know that however coolly he smiles and raises the limit to anything he can cover, Charley Kyng is a real person; he can make the wrong call. "Even the house can lose, I guess, if it plays too long."
Any Number Can Play can afford the eucatastrophe of its ending because it establishes from the start that it isn't taking place in Runyonland. As Charley makes his rounds of the evening, he's pointed toward a young woman played by Dorothy Comingore despondently loitering by the off-track windows, having lost even her wedding ring on a long shot. His soft-touch chivalry of awarding her the amount she didn't win on the transparently flimsy pretext that the wire service called the wrong horse—as Tycoon observes dryly, "He's a nut when it comes to human dignity"—is repaid not by gratitude, but by an embarrassed self-righteousness that berates him all the way out the door. Lon has to face an even less pleasant aftermath in the form of a house call from an older couple who have lost their life savings, demanding a refund as though her living room is the casino's front office. "Cheat!" Isabel Randolph's Mrs. Lorgan hisses at the younger woman even as her husband tugs at her arm: her anger might be displacement, but the money's still gone. "You live in a fancy neighborhood in a fine big house, but a disgrace, that's what you are, a disgrace!" Ben Snelerr's trembling-handed addiction isn't romantic and neither is his suicide attempt in the men's washroom where Robbie, the putz, almost lost his loaded dice down the drain. If we are to accept Charley as real, then the same is true of his profession, and just because the film doesn't throw a moral wingding about it doesn't mean its take is Capraesque. Then we can believe that the denizens of the casino will rally around Charley when Rober and Conrad's Debretti and Sistina decide to take at gunpoint everything he's laid on the line and we can believe that when he gets out of his chosen racket at last, he'll do it on his own terms and leave behind him a story that fittingly bookends "the hand that beat Ben Snelerr." The one was fairly earned and the other the best excuse he ever had for cheating. Neither was predictable, which may be something of the point.
I am faintly surprised the original novel has not been reprinted by Hard Case Crime, but Any Number Can Play really might not be hardboiled enough; it would pair peculiarly well with Jack Webb's -30- (1959) as a slice of life in an ecosystem and a snapshot of the characters that inhabit it. The music is better, scantly furnished by Lennie Hayton over the opening and closing credits. I keep forgetting that Mervyn LeRoy has directed so many films I love, which looks like partly a function of his prolific career and partly a hint that I should start paying attention. Should you feel in the mood for a less equivocal view of gambling, there's always Harlan Ellison's "Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes" (1967). I will never be sorry that my fifth-grade teachers taught us about probability by teaching us to play craps. This bundle brought to you by my legit backers at Patreon.
As if to make up for all the genres it's missing out on, the screenplay adapted by Richard Brooks from the 1945 novel by Edward Harris Heth concentrates the action into one Aristotelian night in the life of Clark Gable's Charley Kyng, a professional gambler and successful proprietor of his own establishment faced with a three-way collision of stressors to which an early retirement would seem the obvious solution if he weren't so reluctant to take it. Like any legitimate flannel drone, he has spent the last fifteen years arguably more wedded to his job than to Alexis Smith's Lon, so much so that although an easy chemistry still simmers between them, she has quietly redecorated a room in the basement of their house in the suburbs into a memory palace of the cold-water flat they occupied as Depression-era newlyweds before his legendary hand of spades changed their fortunes in '34. All parents are mortally embarrassing to their teenagers, but a father in a less colorful line of work wouldn't leave Darryl Hickman's Paul Kyng so open to bullying—on prom night, no less—over the stigma of "[his] old man's clip joint." A high-powered executive, however, might still receive the diagnosis of angina for which Charley is recommended to knock off the smokes and booze and the nightly roller coaster of riding herd on the poker and the ponies and the tables of craps and blackjack and the slot machines and the high rollers and low company attracted by the dream of luck on tap at Charley's: "What you're saying is that if I give up living, I'll live." He should know better than anyone that the house always wins, but he doesn't want to quit while he's on top; no gambler ever does. The roulette wheel rattles down and Charley's slacker of a brother-in-law has got himself in dutch with some goons who'll get him out if he helps them crook the house; the stickman's patter floats over the click of chips and a smiling old shark pockets deep in oil money announces his intention to break the bank. "What do they prove with dice?" the kid who has spent most of his life trying to know as little as possible about his father's business suddenly needs to find out. The answer he gets is the only riddle there is: "Maybe themselves."
Any Number Can Play was a rare non-musical production of the Freed unit and I admit to feeling a little sorry just because a pulpier treatment is tantalizing to imagine, but despite the encumbrances of its budget, a neat percentage of the story evades the well-known gloss of MGM. It's almost pre-Code in the matter-of-factness with which it treats gambling as a business, especially since the film is set expressly not in Las Vegas, the sole legal location for casinos rather than racetracks or lotteries in the United States in 1949—the rain-shaken streets of its carefully unnamed city are Midwestern by implication, thus accounting for the casual inference of payola when Charley jokes about never actually being invited to the policeman's ball he buys a thousand dollars in tickets every year to. We understand from the same conversation that he doesn't cheat on his income tax and that there are contingencies with names like Manzetti for collecting on checks that bounce. The integrity with which he manages his borderline business differentiates him from a gangster made good, except in the eyes of his son. To Paul already struggling in the shadow of his sporting father, there's nothing estimable about belonging to "the notorious Kyng family." His alienation bewilders Charley, who sees no difference between the casino with his name on it and any other self-made American success: "I take a few bucks, see—me, a nobody—and run it into a bundle in the roughest, toughest race of them all where you don't get any second guesses. I build a legit business, a reputation. Nobody can point a finger at Charley Kyng and say he didn't pay off, nobody can say they didn't get a fair shake. Me, who couldn't spit in the same ocean with some people! Now they're proud to know me. I've built a place where I'm as good as anybody. Better." The most interesting thing about this speech is that the film backs it up. It isn't the boast of a charismatic antihero right before Code-mandated Fortune swings her wheel downward and his empire of chance, glamorous, but sin-gotten, with it. One of the best sequences in the picture is the very first because it's nothing more than a crisp, low-key précis of opening a casino for the night, employees drifting in at quarter to six to shave and eat night-shift breakfast, brush the felt of the tables and pour the bowls of peanuts for the bar and set up the long racks of chips. The last tracks are closing on the West Coast, the restaurant at the front of the house filling up. Not much action goes on early in the evening and even when it begins to filter in, it's just people, not the personifications of a morality play. We meet some hustlers, some losers, one first-timer who actually takes his winnings and goes home. By the time Charley's future is riding on the line of a climactic game of craps, it's even more gripping because it doesn't feel Hollywood-rigged: it would be dramatically apt for him to end the night cleaned out into ironic retirement, but it's just as feasible that he might make one more eight the hard way and stay on top. The radio switched on by Lon in the domestic sphere supposedly as separate from the cards and bones that fund it as an upstairs-downstairs by Sholem Asch is hard-selling a call-in contest just so we don't miss how the literal air of consumer culture is shot through with the lure of the jackpot: "Yes, sir, maid and butler service for one full year! A two-seated aeroplane! Enough frozen food for two long years! And tonight we're adding fifty-two weeks of free service at your favorite hairdresser or barber . . . Are you the lucky one? All right! All you have to do is to guess the name of . . ." A noir would be bitterer about it. It's just as bracing in its own way that Any Number Can Play assumes we already know.
The other benefit of MGM, aside from the long-lined, late-night cinematography of Harold Rosson that excels at cruising the spaces of the casino like an eddy of cigarette smoke, is its deep bench of contract players and poaching rights, whence a stacked cast of character turns such as Barry Sullivan's Tycoon, the right-hand man who takes off his tortoiseshell horn-rims to fire a doubting croupier with two discreet jabs to the solar plexus, or Caleb Peterson's Sleigh, the doorman who gets one of the best kiss-off lines of the night refusing the racist nickname "George." It's marvelous to see Frank Morgan cast against type as shrewd high-stakes heavyweight Jim Kurstyn, jovially dominating the tables until every other game has fallen off to watch him run the house out of chips; ditto Lewis Stone as the nearly derelict Ben Snelerr, the cautionary specter of the big time reduced to pawning his dead wife's heirlooms for one last fling with Lady Luck. Richard Rober and William Conrad make a persuasively crummy double act as the hoods with an eye for a lucky break and Marjorie Rambeau steals her every scene as Sarah Calbern, the broad-beamed society dowager who flirts and gambles as dashingly as the aging gallant she is and snaps down the phone to her lawyer after midnight, "I am not kidnapped and I've never been drunk in my life. I happen to be in a high-class crap game!" It is ultimately the script's fault that the domestic scenes are the weakest in the picture until they cross streams with the action downtown, but it doesn't help that the one-scene wonder of Mary Astor as an old almost-flame of Charley's inevitably conjures the AU where she played Lon. Smith gets better as the screenplay lets her off her decorative, protected leash, but Hickman frustratingly seems to have been cast more for his resemblance to Gable than any ability to convince as an awkward, prudish, not unsalvageable adolescent. Wendell Corey, on the other hand, is turning out not just a shape-changer but an actor who can put a part over without vanity, which is just as well because as Robbie Elcott he has grounds for absolutely none. He gets a triple threat of a no-good introduction: sponging off his brother-in-law, whining at his wife, and on the hook for $2000 to the kind of gentlemen who collect in arms and legs. His sharp face is hardly anything but spooked and peevish, his nasal, resentful mumble of a voice brightens only with opportunism or weak-willed relief. He's just a complete failed person, incapable of making an exit with either apology or dignity—at a crucial moment of solidarity in the casino, Robbie singularly bolts to save his own skin. His wife sums him up with withering concision: "Robbie's a small-time gambler. He's a small-time cheat and a small-time man. He never does anything good enough for me to love him and nothing bad enough for me to leave him." Casting Alice Elcott with the brittle peroxide of Audrey Totter is shorthand genius, since even underused she is fabulously acid; pairing her with Corey is almost a mistake, since it suggests the noir they aren't starring in. Get me a time machine and a line to Hal Wallis. As for Gable, I have curiously less experience of him than of other Hollywood luminaries of his stature and generation, but I like seeing him at human-size, deliberately underlined as such by the plot. The $20,000 to open his own place really did come from an all-night no-holds-barred poker game whose winning hand is still framed on his desk, but his famous trick of flipping a playing card over a four-story building is revealed by his wife as a delightful bit of chicanery dependent on afternoon updrafts. Even more than the complication of a heart condition, it contributes to the tension of the final crapshoot because we know that however coolly he smiles and raises the limit to anything he can cover, Charley Kyng is a real person; he can make the wrong call. "Even the house can lose, I guess, if it plays too long."
Any Number Can Play can afford the eucatastrophe of its ending because it establishes from the start that it isn't taking place in Runyonland. As Charley makes his rounds of the evening, he's pointed toward a young woman played by Dorothy Comingore despondently loitering by the off-track windows, having lost even her wedding ring on a long shot. His soft-touch chivalry of awarding her the amount she didn't win on the transparently flimsy pretext that the wire service called the wrong horse—as Tycoon observes dryly, "He's a nut when it comes to human dignity"—is repaid not by gratitude, but by an embarrassed self-righteousness that berates him all the way out the door. Lon has to face an even less pleasant aftermath in the form of a house call from an older couple who have lost their life savings, demanding a refund as though her living room is the casino's front office. "Cheat!" Isabel Randolph's Mrs. Lorgan hisses at the younger woman even as her husband tugs at her arm: her anger might be displacement, but the money's still gone. "You live in a fancy neighborhood in a fine big house, but a disgrace, that's what you are, a disgrace!" Ben Snelerr's trembling-handed addiction isn't romantic and neither is his suicide attempt in the men's washroom where Robbie, the putz, almost lost his loaded dice down the drain. If we are to accept Charley as real, then the same is true of his profession, and just because the film doesn't throw a moral wingding about it doesn't mean its take is Capraesque. Then we can believe that the denizens of the casino will rally around Charley when Rober and Conrad's Debretti and Sistina decide to take at gunpoint everything he's laid on the line and we can believe that when he gets out of his chosen racket at last, he'll do it on his own terms and leave behind him a story that fittingly bookends "the hand that beat Ben Snelerr." The one was fairly earned and the other the best excuse he ever had for cheating. Neither was predictable, which may be something of the point.
I am faintly surprised the original novel has not been reprinted by Hard Case Crime, but Any Number Can Play really might not be hardboiled enough; it would pair peculiarly well with Jack Webb's -30- (1959) as a slice of life in an ecosystem and a snapshot of the characters that inhabit it. The music is better, scantly furnished by Lennie Hayton over the opening and closing credits. I keep forgetting that Mervyn LeRoy has directed so many films I love, which looks like partly a function of his prolific career and partly a hint that I should start paying attention. Should you feel in the mood for a less equivocal view of gambling, there's always Harlan Ellison's "Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes" (1967). I will never be sorry that my fifth-grade teachers taught us about probability by teaching us to play craps. This bundle brought to you by my legit backers at Patreon.
no subject
Yes, exactly. There seems to be absolutely no ego involved. He's like an anti-prima donna.
no subject
I'm enjoying him so much. I haven't yet seen him as the same kind of character twice and he's exactly what he needs to be for all of them. And with that really distinctive face, too.
no subject
no subject
Middle-aged Clark Gable, too! He does well with it. He has a whole lot of normal problems, just also a casino.
It seems like a domestic drama kind of thing with the casino hung on for set dressing, from this angle; I think you did correctly invoking Asch.
The casino is the major set and the strongest vector of the plot, so it's at least fifty-fifty, but thank you. If any of the writers had been Jewish, I'd have wondered if it was deliberate.
no subject
The most interesting thing about this speech is that the film backs it up. It isn't the boast of a charismatic antihero right before Code-mandated Fortune swings her wheel downward and his empire of chance, glamorous, but sin-gotten, with it ... Not much action goes on early in the evening and even when it begins to filter in, it's just people, not the personifications of a morality play. --Nice.
no subject
I liked it a lot! The non-judgmental, pre-Code quality really meant I couldn't guess which way the chips were literally going to fall, which was as much of a surprise to me as the genres it wasn't and extremely welcome.