I seem to have offended your light of love by using a polysyllabic word

I slept almost twelve hours last night. Quite possibly that's more than the entire previous week combined. Finally I can do something with my brain.

Here's the thing about Van Heflin. If you cast him in westerns, he's a decent, embattled family man, and I always remember Alan Ladd in Shane (1953) and Glenn Ford in 3:10 to Yuma (1957) instead. If you cast him in film noir, he's exponentially more interesting and I've made a mental note to check out The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946) and The Prowler (1951). And if you cast him in Johnny Eager (1942), he walks off with the entire picture in the pocket of his unbuttoned overcoat, weaving unsteadily but unstoppably through the tropes of the crime film with a distracted disregard for heteronormativity and the PCA. No wonder he won an Oscar for it—at thirty-two years old, the youngest winner in his category until Jack Lemmon beat him by a year for Mister Roberts in 1956. Jeff Hartnett is the most real person in his movie and one of the nicest queer characters I've met in his genre. How text is the subtext in this movie? I watched it over Easter weekend with my mother. As we were washing the dishes afterward, she said suddenly, "You kept waiting for them to kiss!"

He's not the protagonist, of course. Robert Taylor headlines as the evocatively named Johnny Eager, a formerly high-rolling racketeer turned ostensible model parolee; he makes an honest living as a taxi driver and never misses an appointment with his parole officer, but behind the scenes he's preparing to open a dog track with an old associate as the front, resuming his position at the head of the city's underworld. Lately the routine buy-offs have hit a roadblock in the person of John Benson Farrell (Edward Arnold), the same crusading DA who originally put Johnny behind bars and is now cracking down on gambling until Johnny's ambitious second-in-command fumes, "I haven't got a dozen books running—no dice, no roulette, my whole crowd's hungry . . . I got sixty slot collectors on my payroll, you know? I can't pay them off with conversation." With the impeccable coincidence of melodrama, the cool bombshell of a sociology student with whom Johnny's latest sparks are flying (Lana Turner, also starring above the title) will turn out to be his old enemy's stepdaughter, a potential lever on a famously incorruptible public figure—and Johnny will have to decide between criminal success and the less material rewards of the heart when his plan to buy her old man's silence with her complicity in an apparent crime exacts a harsher toll on the stubbornly faithful Lisbeth than Johnny had expected to care about. Despite its gritty, Warner-esque crime trappings, the film's essential question is a romantic one: can Johnny Eager love? Certainly he's shown no signs of it before now. He brushes off girlfriends old and new with the same cold-blooded charm, smiling no less attractively for his absolute indifference to their plights. When his oldest friend double-crosses him for a share in an up-and-coming, less patient syndicate, Johnny dispatches the man with the help of a bridge and a freight train and then returns to a poker game which he wins easily, grinning at his unsettled rivals as he lets slip the fate of poor, late Lew Rankin (Barry Nelson) and pockets the pot. The philosophy he expresses is tough, careless, and looking out for number one: "Give your best pal your last fifty bucks, wouldn't you? Well, he's already a dead duck or he wouldn't need the fifty, and after he's spent it you're both strictly from hunger. So what? Sure, the suckers all give me sour looks—the minute they stop, I'm worried, see, because then I know I'm not on my toes. And that's where I'm staying, ready to hit the first guy that's fool enough to try and cross me in the first place." He shows a puzzled affection toward a retired greyhound left to him by a backer of the dog track, but come on, that's a TV Trope. Let's get back to Van Heflin.

Throughout the film's opening scenes, as he goes about his business on both sides of the law, Johnny has one question for everyone he meets: "Seen Jeff Hartnett today?" He finally gets an answer from his devoted but neglected moll Garnet (Patricia Dane), whose exasperation suggests this isn't the first time this evidently important, as yet unexplained figure has gone AWOL: "Oh, sure, but he wandered away, full of gin and big words." We still won't meet him for another ten minutes, but that's Jeff in a nutshell, like a cross between Clive Brook's Rolls Royce in Underworld (1927) and Thomas Mitchell's Kid in Only Angels Have Wings (1939).¹ He's not beautiful like Taylor's Johnny with his debonair mustache and his suggestive mouth, but he's got the more interesting looks of the two, more slender in the face than in any of Heflin's later roles, angular enough to look taller than his nearly six feet. His heavy-lidded eyes give him a curious resemblance to Peter Lorre, albeit a fair-haired, Shakespeare-quoting drop-out version. Most of the time he's got a drink in his hand and usually a cigarette, too; minus these accoutrements, he's either hungover or asleep. He's clever, disheveled, melancholy, sarcastic. He has a tired, educated voice, dry and meandering, sometimes very gentle. His face is always having an argument with itself—the mouth is cynical, but the eyes are concerned. His position in Johnny's organization is vague but unassailable. He's a right-hand brain, a confidant and a connection; if he doesn't get too plastered on his information-gathering rounds, he's as good as a daily paper for the news of the underworld. He accompanies Johnny almost everywhere, referring to himself as "a modern-day Boswell, meticulously recording for posterity the doings of a unique individual—an individual out of the days of the Medicis, and I'm your Boswell. The story of Johnny Eager. The next forty generations will find it required reading along with the words of Machiavelli." He also reads, quite naturally, as Johnny's lover.

That Jeff is in love with Johnny, I am confident is intended on the film's part. Any further implications may have snuck in accidentally around the edges, but they marshal a surprising amount of evidence on their side. ( Now I know why you keep me around. )

I have to run, so I'll wrap up fast. I watched Johnny Eager just two days after speculating aloud on the fantasy casting of Frederick Nebel's John X. Kennedy. I didn't realize how beautifully Van Heflin would fit the bill, right down to the crying. Alternately, selected scenes from this movie function quite decently as film noir AU of Ellen Kushner's Swordspoint (1987). It took me all afternoon and evening to write this post, but Jeff Hartnett and Johnny Eager are worth it. This soft noir brought to you by my smart backers at Patreon.

1. A film I have wanted to write about for years and almost did in January before getting derailed by Arisia. Watch this space, dammit. [edit] It only took three more years!

2. He's standing in the doorway when Johnny asks hesitantly, referencing an earlier exchange with Lisbeth, "Say, Jeff, you know these things—that guy Cyrano, Cyrano de Bergerac or something—does a dame really fall for the type of chatter he gave out?" Despite the hangover and the bromide, Jeff squints at him with expertly deadpan apprehensiveness: "Are you starting to encounter literate dames?"–"Who said anything about dames?" Johnny snaps immediately. "Go on to bed."

3. Never mind Wilmer, the things Joel Cairo does with his cane in that first interview with Sam Spade are an amazing exercise in the subliminally X-rated.