Reeling Backward: "The Greaty McGinty" (1941)

Circa 1940 Preston Sturges was one of Hollywood's most successful screenwriters who really yearned to direct. He was getting paid $2,500 a week -- that's north of $2 million a year in today's dollars -- to churn out screwball comedies and rehashed plots, hating every minute of it. So Sturges sold his script for "The Great McGinty" for $10 on the condition that he be allowed to direct it himself.

(Rather than hiding this fact, Paramount actually promoted it as part of the film's marketing push.)

In the short term Paramount seemed to get the better end of it, as "The Great McGinty" was a decent hint and Sturges won the Academy Award for Original Screenplay -- undoubtedly the lowest-paid Oscar-winning gig ever. But Sturges got what he wanted, a director's seat, and went on to a well-respected, if not particularly lengthy, career behind the camera ("Sullivan's Travels," "Unfaithfully Yours").

"McGinty" is interesting to me for three reasons. It's one of the few leading roles by Brian Donlevy, who usually played supporting parts as crooks and tough guys, most notably as the cruel Sergeant Markoff in "Beau Geste." He had one of those angled faces that, like Martin Landau, seemed almost cartoonishly villainous from a distance, but upon closer inspection was actually breathtakingly beautiful. He's effective and charming here as a lug who makes it big, then loses it all.

Second, the movie uses a storytelling framing device set many years after and thousands of miles away from the central plot, which was a pretty novel premise in 1940. ("Citizen Kane" would go on to employ it soon after.)

But most intriguingly, "McGinty" seems to fly in the face of the Production Code, which more or less mandated that reproachable behavior always be punished in the movies, and acts of goodness are invariably rewarded in the end, even if it takes awhile. ("It's a Wonderful Life" being the classic example.)

Here, the main character is a lout and a thief who becomes a state governor through outright graft and corruption. Happiness and status accrue to him the more rotten he is, including a show marriage that turns into a genuine love affair and close ties with her adopted children. But when he goes straight and attempts to do something honest for the first time ever, his entire life immediately comes crashing down.

McGinty hightails it to a remote country and becomes a bartender at a seedy dive, pouring out cheap booze along with his own story to troubled pilgrims. The wife and kids? Utterly abandoned. If you're expecting a last-minute reunion where the woman walks into his gin joint to reassure the audience everything turned out OK in the end, you'll be waiting a long time.

What's the takeaway here? It's better to be honest, but if you're a crook you'd best stay a crook?

At a spare 81 minutes, "The Great McGinty" flies by at a breakneck pace. It almost seems like one minute Dan McGinty (Donlevy) is a street bum who earns a wad of cash by going from precinct to precinct to vote for the mayor dozens of times, to becoming the mayor himself and then the governor.

The best and funniest part is the second act as McGinty becomes the collections enforcer for the local mob boss (Akim Tamiroff) -- credited, simply, as "The Boss" -- who keeps the politicians in his pocket. The Boss is bemused by the pug-nosed nobody who dares to punch him back when punched. The two form an odd brotherly relationship, exchanging brash displays of masculinity and always ready to throw down in fisticuffs at any disagreement.

McGinty buys himself an outlandish striped suit and sets out to collect outstanding debts for The Boss. He uses his fists when provoked, but shows a gift of gab, talking an elderly female psychic out of $200 by pointing out the risks to her own future. This leads to a stint as city alderman, handing out contracts for bribes.

When the longtime Mayor (Arthur Hoyt) becomes outdated for the reform-minded times, McGinty is picked as the golden boy. Since women have recently gotten the vote -- an indication the main story is set in the 1920s -- McGinty needs to be a family man. His secretary, Catherine (Muriel Angelus), volunteers for the duty, pointing out it will mutually benefit each of them -- though she fails to mention her two urchins until after the wedding vows are sealed.

Of course, once McGinty feels he is "free" of The Boss' influence, he starts listening to Catherine's urging to shut down the tenements and pass new child labor laws. The Boss doesn't take kindly to the insurrection, leading to a throwdown right in the new governor's office.

I quite enjoyed "The Greaty McGinty," though it's obviously a minor work in the oeuvre of Preston Sturges. It's the rare movie that would have been better if it were longer and slower. Still, it got him through the studio's door, gave Donlevy one of his most memorable roles and delivered a subtle middle finger to the rigid filmmaking mores of the day.

Reeling Backward: "Hangmen Also Die!" (1943)

I was fairly disappointed with "Hangmen Also Die!", a noir war drama from 1943. Its pedigree is impressive: directed by the great Fritz Lang, it starred favorite character actor Brian Donlevy and featured a script by revered playwright Bertolt Brecht, his only official screenwriting credit (though he was known to do plenty of script-doctoring in his day).

The film recently received a loving restoration and Blu-ray edition, which looks and sounds fantastic. So I held out high hopes that here was a forgotten World War II picture that I might adore, much in the vein of Battleground!

Alas and alack. Donlevy is actually quite flat and apathetic, in a role so small it's ridiculous that he's billed as the star. Lang is always good for a few haunting frames and clever use of shadow, but compared to "Metropolis" or any other of his seminal work it's not terribly imaginative.

And Brecht's story is just a complete jumbled mess. Its emotional high points arrive at odd points, so there's less of a feeling of a building crescendo than just some stirring speeches that randomly arrive and disappear. The most interesting character is a Gestapo inspector, and the last act is a nigh-incomprehensible patchwork in which a local Nazi collaborator is framed for the murder of a high German official.

The movie is loosely based on the real 1942 assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, who was the Reich Protector of German-occupied Prague. The film is essentially a paean to the Czech people and their brave resistance to the Nazis.

Donlevy plays Dr. Svoboda, a local surgeon who carries out the shooting of Heydrich, who lingers for a few days while the Nazis seek the assassin(s). While being chased by soldiers, he's helped by a young woman on the street who points the Germans in the opposite direction, but then the Gestapo tracks her down and starts raking her and her family over the coals.

She is Mascha Novotny, played by Anna Lee, and really she is the main character. Everything else revolves around her. She and Svoboda strike up a faux romance to throw the Germans off the hunt, which doesn't do much for the affections of her real fiance, Jan (Dennis O'Keefe), an upstanding type.

The Nazis are mostly fooled except for Gestapo inspector Gruber, deliciously played by Alexander Granach. Short, burly with a Cheetos mustache and odd shaved-sides haircut that resembles a proto-mohawk, Gruber supplies much of the middle section's energy. Granach was actually a German Jew who fled his homeland shortly after Hitler's rise to power, and made himself a healthy film career playing both Nazis and heroes.

Gruber is suspicious of everyone and everything, and unlike his more heavy-handed counterparts who are quick to resort to mental and physical torture, he mostly gets things done by out-thinking those around him. He's also capable of being quite the party boy when the mood strikes, and he gets to canoodle with an appropriately matronly German floozy.

Shoehorned in is a mostly parallel story about Anna' father, Professor Novotny, played by the great character actor Walter Brennan. The professor is a noted academic figure who has eschewed politics for the past 15 years, but then he and a bunch of other intellectuals are snatched up and held hostage in retaliation for the assassination attempt. Soon the Nazis are executing them a bunch at a time until the real shooter gives himself up.

Brennan gets to do that whole "quiet nobility" thing, and he's quite good at it, but these scenes don't fit with the rest of the story. It almost becomes a POW film, with the professor and his fellows bonding and writing revolutionary poems while waiting for the axe to fall.

The most interesting thing about "Hangmen" is its depiction of how people deal with an occupying force -- both in their regards to the enemy and how they relate with those of their number who cooperate.

Anna soon learns that Svoboda is the assassin, and insists that he give himself up to save the life of her father and the other hostages. Svoboda -- under pressure from other members of the resistance -- demurs, pointing out that his act is essential to their movement to overthrow the Germans. At one point she actually gets in a carriage to Gestapo headquarters to spill the beans, and is nearly assaulted when a mob finds out her plan.

Eventually she comes around to the right side of things, and assists Svoboda and the other resistance leaders in concocting an elaborate frame job to convince the Nazis that one of their Czech collaborators, a rich beer baron named Czaka (Gene Lockhart), was actually the assassin. This involves getting dozens of witnesses to lie about Czaka's whereabouts, and seems highly implausible.

"Hangmen Also Die!" exists now mostly as an artifact of its time, a pot-boiling bit of propaganda designed to whip up the masses. As a piece of filmmaking, though, it leaves much to be desired.

Reeling Backward: "Kiss of Death" (1947)

"Kiss of Death" is a movie that's well-remembered, but mostly for the wrong reasons.

Like "From Here to Eternity," it's a film that's come to be summed up in the popular gestalt for a single scene, even though that scene isn't particularly representative of the movie around it. It's like putting an unexpected ingredient in the middle of a sandwich, say a chocolate bon-bon inside a turkey on rye.

It doesn't matter if the sandwich was bland or wonderful; people are going to remember the bon-bon.

For "Eternity" it was the beachside kiss. For "Kiss of Death," it's a soulless hood pushing a woman in a wheelchair down a flight of stairs to her demise.

Like many people I'd seen snippets of the wheelchair scene, but not the whole movie. Having recently viewed "Kiss of Death," it struck me that within the context of the story, it's a rather brief, almost throwaway scene. It exists not because the woman is important -- we're introduced to her moments before she dies -- or that her death plays a pivotal role in the story. It's simply intended as a shocking moment to depict how despicable the villain, Tommy Udo, really is.

To audiences in 1947, it surely must have been quite a surprise to see a disabled woman ("crippled" they would have said in those days) killed by a giggling lunatic for no good reason at all. But it's a shame that people more readily recall that act of depravity than the character behind it, or the actor who created him.

Truthfully, "Kiss of Death" is a rather flat and unengaging example of early film noir, a crime story that's meant to underscore the value of upright citizenship. But its real thrill is luridly exposing the audience to a wildly charismatic villain.

For my money, Tommy Udo should be right up there with Keyser Soze and Hannibal Lecter on the list of greatest cinematic villains. He's a jittery, shivery figure who makes you feel like bugs are crawling all over you whenever he's onscreen.

It was the first film role for Richard Widmark, who'd mostly been known for his stage work, and would earn him his first and only Oscar nomination. It also set the tone for his career, in which he largely played men who easily turn to violence during his younger years, and corrupt cops or misguided soldiers as he got older. Even his heroic roles like "Warlock" are shot through with moral ambiguity.

After Tommy Udo, straight heroics were out for Widmark.

Widmark's look and mannerisms in the film are highly stylized and memorable. He always wears dark shirts with a light-colored tie, the mark of an operator. He moves in a languid style, almost as if the world around him bores him. When he's talking to someone he tends to stare them straight in the eye, virtually without blinking, a rictus smile seeming to split his skull horizontally. His teeth somehow seem malovelent.

He speaks in a nasally Noo Yawk pattern, warping his vowels and swallowing his consanants, to the point where it can be hard to understand what he's saying. At one point on a train he announces that it's his birthday, but it comes out something like, "Ehz meeh boithdoy!"

If Widmark's Tommy Udo seems evocative of a certain other character, that's because he is. Widmark was reputedly fascinated with the Joker in the Batman comics of that era, and patterned his look, smile and laughter after the famed psychopath who would later be portrayed by Jack Nicholson, Heath Ledger and others.

The only difference is there's no joking to Udo, despite his nearly non-stop laughter. That giggle seems to escape out of him like noxious gas out of cesspool, unable to be contained. According to biographer Kim Holston, Widmark would be approached by strangers for years afterwards asking him to reproduce the famous laughter, or even record it for them.

Udo laughs at those around him, whom he divides into two categories: "squirts," the everyday folks who deserve only to be browbeaten and murdered, and a "big man" who carries himself above the rest.

The only other person in the movie Udo regards as a big man is protagonist Nick Bianco, played by Victor Mature in a performance that can only be described as bored. Nick's a thief who gets shot by the police during a jewelery heist in the opening sequence, and eventually gets squeezed into being an informant for the assistant district attorney (Brian Donlevy).

The first half of the movie is utterly tedious, apart from a brief couple of scenes where Nick first meets Tommy in jail. It's basically a morality lesson where Nick tries to play the part of the proud criminal who refuses to become a snitch. But then his wife kills himself over being left destitute with two young daughters, and he sees the error of his ways.

That sets up the pursuit of Udo, which doesn't go very well when he's acquitted by a jury and comes after Nick. Or, more accurately, Nick -- now living under an assumed name -- seeks out Tommy to settle things between them once and for all.

That doesn't really make much sense, since it's doubtful Tommy could have even found him. But it's all part of the nitwit plot concocted by screenwriters Ben Hecht and Charles Lederer, based on a story by Eleazar Lipsky.

It's a decent-looking film (directed by Henry Hathaway) though it doesn't have much of the extravagant juxtaposition of light and dark that other noir films would use so expertly. The movie also opens with a strange scrawl assuring the audience that everything they see was shot in the actual location where it happened -- odd, considering it is a fiction film.

Interestingly, Widmark was not considered by the studio to be any big shakes when they were marketing the movie -- his name does not even appear on the poster. Coleen Gray, who was also making her film debut playing Nick's nanny-turned-new-wife (ick!), got the glamorous "and introducing..." treatment.

Frankly, if it weren't for Widmark's wonderfully off-putting Tommy Udo, "Kiss of Death" would have been a completely forgettable film -- even with the wheelchair push.

Reeling Backward: "Beau Geste"

Nineteen thirty-nine is the year that keeps on giving -- when it comes to great classic films, that is.

"Beau Geste" is one of those movies that has been somewhat shunted aside in film history. People speak well of it, but not in the same breath as the masterpieces of that era.

Directed by William A. Wellman -- who also helmed "A Star is Born" and "Battleground," both recently featured on Reeling Backward -- "Beau Geste" is an old-fashioned adventure tale about men seeking their fortune in distant lands, with strange enemies and even stranger so-called allies. In setting and tone it reminded me very much of "Gunga Din," made the same year.

I liked it well enough -- the story has Gary Cooper, Robert Preston and Ray Milland as adopted brothers who join the French Foreign Legion, with the mystery of a stolen sapphire hanging over them.

There's some wonderfully harrowing battle scenes, and the opening sequence is haunting and mesmerizing: A column of legionnaires roll up on a remote desert fortress. It seems to be well-defended, but as they get closer they can see that all the men manning the battlements are dead. There's no enemy in sight. How could all those men die standing up, with their hats still on their heads and their rifles clutched in their lifeless hands?

But I suppose what really put this movie over the top for me was the villain, who has instantly catapulted to my list of all-time great cinematic nemeses. Sgt. Markoff, played by Brian Donlevy, is a tough-talking, sadistic SOB who believes in whipping men into line, and shooting them if they don't. He has no trouble sacrificing his men if it means winning himself a medal and a promotion.

And yet, as one of the brothers acknowledges, he's probably the best soldier any of them will ever meet.

At one point, Markoff puts down a mutiny and is prepared to execute dozens of men, but when a tribe of Arab begins attacking the fortress, he rallies the men -- even the disloyal ones -- to fight like lions. It's also his idea to prop up the dead soldiers on the battlements, so it appears to the enemy that their numbers have not diminished.

The three brothers were adopted by Lady Pat and raised in comfort. (A young Donald O'Connor, before he made 'em laugh in "Singin' in the Rain," plays 12-year-old Beau.) But Lady Pat's husband, who is absent nearly all the time, has spent the family into ruin. Her only recourse is to sell the Blue Water, the biggest sapphire in the world, which is the family's greatest heirloom.

But the sapphire is stolen before the sale. Beau (Cooper), the oldest, writes a letter confessing to the crime, but younger brothers Digby (Preston) and John (Milland) suspect he did so in order to direct any blame away from the guilty party. They decide the only honorable thing to do is follow his example, so they too confess to the crime and leave the estate.

They all end up in the Foreign Legion, which is a motley crew of thieves and murderers. Keeping them under his iron fist is Markoff, who learns of the sapphire and means to have it for himself. Donlevy gives a great, scene-chewing performance, and was nominated for an Oscar for his supporting role. Markoff's signature line -- "I promise you!" -- is used as an ever-present threat to those who would defy him.

If you watch the movie, make sure to look at Donlevy's feet -- he's wearing some pretty obvious elevator shoes to make himself appear taller. I guess he didn't want Markoff to look like a shrimp next to Gary Cooper and Ray Milland, both of whom stood a few inches over 6 foot.

I also learned a bit of trvia: In filming the scene where John fatally stabs Markoff, Milland apparently missed Donlevy's protective padding and really did pierce him through the ribs, resulting in a fairly serious injury.

"Beau Geste" -- which means "beautiful gesture" in French -- was based on the novel by Percival Christopher Wren. The 1939 version was not the only screen adaptation. There was a 1926 version, and the story was remade in 1966 with Guy Stockwell, Leslie Nielsen and Telly Savalas. There was also a 1982 TV mini-series, and google-eyed comedian Marty Feldman directed and starred in a 1977 spoof titled, very tongue-in-cheek, "The Last Remake of Beau Geste."

3.5 stars