Hallelujah, I'm a Bum! - 1933

Hallelujah, I’m a Bum (1933), released during the worst period of the Great Depression, is, paradoxically, joyful and fearless.  It is not, however, a sample of those fantasy type films so prevalent during the Depression meant to lift the nation’s spirits and take away our troubles; on the contrary, it mocks and accuses and deals with the sin and hypocrisy of wealth disparity with a sly grin and a sneer.

This is our entry in The Fabulous Films of the ‘30s blogathon sponsored by the Classic Movie Blog Association (CMBA).

The movie is rife with risk taking in terms of story and camera technique, and is so avant garde a piece today’s viewers will ultimately scratch their heads in wonder.  But it is not a movie to disparage, idolize, or even analyze.  It defies close examination by virtue of its freewheeling and utterly unconcerned posture with what we think.

Hallelujah, I’m a Bum! stars Al Jolson, and here is about the only area where the film does not take a risk. He was a top star of vaudeville, records, radio, and movies back in the day, and if we find his eye-rolling, blackface shtick ridiculous or offensive, we must still credit the man with enormous success and fame.  But here, there’s none of his usual manic overacting, no blackface, no shtick.  He is a likeable leading man, and even a romantic hero—who spurns our admiration with mocking even as he earns it. 

Frank Morgan, who made a career of elderly scamps plays—who’d have thought it—a leading man and handsome lover with a mistress whom he drives to a suicide attempt with his paranoid accusations of her unfaithfulness. 

This is also a buddy picture, and Jolson’s best pal is Edgar Connor, a diminutive fellow ex-vaudevillian, and rare example of a black man being best pals with a white man. 

Harry Langdon, silent screen comic destroys his former innocent baby-like persona and becomes a disgruntled, disgusted, and loudmouthed communist.

Richard Rogers and Lorenz Hart wrote the tunes, and more.  On several occasions in this movie, the dialogue is spoken in a burst of rhyming couplets. 

Rhyming couplets.

If these oddities weren’t enough, there is the delightfully flippant manner in which the movie deals with the crisis at hand: the Great Depression.

The bums, or hoboes, who occupy Central Park in New York are a mob of unrepentant shirkers standing on the edge of society and refusing to join the rat race.  They like their indolence, and some are outright thieves.  Harry Langdon rebukes them for their laziness and says everyone should work, but hates the prevailing capitalist society that brands them as failures even more.  He calls a troop of mounted policemen converging on them “Hoover’s Cossacks.”  He hates everybody, but works diligently as a street cleaner, picking up trash, like Sisyphus rolling back the stone.

Society gets its knocks in this film.  Another scene shows the laying of a cornerstone at a new public school, and the pompous officials being ragged by the blasé construction workers perched on girders.  

An assembly of schoolchildren close the ceremony with “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee,” and as they sing, the camera, strobe-like, flashes on their faces in close-up on each face to the beat of each phrase of the song.  These are not prettied up Hollywood moppets; they’re regular scruffy kids with suspicious expressions at the unfamiliar camera right in their faces.  It’s a fascinating and even disorienting look into our future—which our children represent.  Where is this society taking us?  Where are we taking these kids?  And it’s funny.  There is no point made in this film, however serious and thoughtful, that is not also funny.

We get a tracking shot of business being done in the interior of a bank.  At the beginning, two wheeler-dealer types are discussing a transaction of hundreds of thousands of dollars.  Then the camera moves us along and two others speak of less money, hundreds.  Deals are made and agreed upon.  Money changes hands freely.  By the time we get to the end of the shot, a poor schmuck is standing at a teller window and asking to cash a check for $5.  The teller shakes his head.  They don’t cash checks for that small amount.

Incidentally, both Rogers and Hart get cameos in this movie.  They’re in a scene with Frank Morgan, who kisses babies like a good politician, and they’re in the bank.

Frank Moran is the mayor of New York, a rakish, somewhat corrupt official, but charming as heck, whose good friend is Al Jolson, the “mayor” of Central Park.  Their paths will crisscross throughout the movie.  

Mr. Morgan’s lady friend, played by Madge Evans, attempts suicide by jumping off a bridge, but Al Jolson saves her.  She has suffered amnesia, and with no ID on her (her missing wallet becomes an intricate part of the plot), Jolson has no idea where she belongs.  She is helpless, and he becomes a romantic hero by finding her a room to stay in, and by (gulp!) taking a job to support her.

It’s all very childlike, how he brings her trinkets and takes her to the merry-go-round.  She is an innocent, transformed from the hardened mistress of a politico, and quite charming as she beams over Jolson’s attentiveness to her.  She begs him not to leave her alone, because she is frightened.  In a very warm, romantic scene, they watch from her window a dancehall across the street.  We see the neon sign in a blur, and the figures of dancers in the lighted windows, and hear the music, the lovely tune, “You Are Too Beautiful.”  Jolson takes her in his arms and dances with her, and sings the lyric.  She melts into his embrace, her face truly beatific in her happiness.

Morgan, meanwhile, is distraught that she has gone missing, and begs Jolson to help him find her.  Jolson discovers, heart breaking, that his girl and Morgan’s are the same.  Nobly, he takes Morgan to her, and the shock of seeing him snaps her out of her amnesia.  At once, Jolson is a stranger to her, and she begs Morgan not to leave her, with the same words she pleaded with Jolson. 

Al Jolson stands, framed by the window, watching his happiness slip through is fingers, and we see the neon sign from the dancehall across the street clearly, mockingly: “LOVELAND.”  

He smiles only a very little, with self-deprecating resignation, and with something else—a wish for this woman to be happy.  His moment of stillness, for this usually frenetic performer, is a beautiful and most moving piece of acting.

Our troubles are not forgotten in this movie, let alone solved, but we share the burdens of others and somehow that lightens the load for us.  But we have to be tough.  You never know when life is going to kick you in the teeth while you’re waiting for that bowl of cherries.

At the end of this bitter decade, Clark Gable famously shocked the nation by saying he didn’t “give a damn” in Gone with the Wind.  Here, much earlier, those worst hit by hard times say it in spades.

Hallelujah, I’m a Bum! is on DVD, and occasionally shown on TCM.

Have a look at the other great entries in The Fabulous Films of the ‘30s blogathon.

©Jacqueline T. Lynch, 2007-2015. All rights reserved. If you're reading this on a site other than Another Old Movie Blog, please be aware that this post has been stolen and is used without permission. 

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I'll be sending out advance copies of my Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. tomorrow, and will email them in PDF form (which you can read on your computer) to any blogger who wants to review the book in June.  Please email me at: JacquelineTLynch@gmail.com

....so I can email you the book. 
 

Manhattan Melodrama (1934)

“Manhattan Melodrama” (1934) gives us a squeaky clean District Attorney/Governor, a best pal on the other side of the law, and Myrna Loy, best gal to both of them. In these days of New York Governors a little low on integrity in a really public way, this film captures an era equally guilty of graft and self interest, yet presented through the story of one good guy who feels guilty despite his integrity, and one bad guy who seems not so bad. It also gives us some interesting history of that era.

We are taken back to the characters’ boyhoods, and a traumatic event on the steamer General Slocum. A fun thing about this film is instead of creating an entirely fictitious scenario, we have a fictional story played on a background among real events. The General Slocum burned in 1904, with over 1,000 deaths. The only New York tragedy to claim more lives was 9/11. Few today may even know about the tragedy, but at the time it was an horrific event. We are also shown newsreel shots of 1920s Times Square with a Squibb’s advertisement, trolley cards, and marquees for the Palace and Loew’s. The characters attend the Cotton Club in Harlem, and there is a brief scene showing an actual hockey game (played without helmets or protective gear) at Madison Square Garden.

But for all the realistic shots, all it takes is the inevitable few bars of “Sidewalks of New York” to set the scene of long-ago Old New York and two boys playing on the decks of the General Slocum. One boy is studious, reading even on this outing, and the other is a rogue, played by Mickey Rooney, who plays tricks and cons other kids out of their pennies.

But the boys are pals, and come to the aid of another pal, a boy named Morris, when Morris is picked on. We are shown the immigrant hyphenated Americans on their one day off from the factory, Irish, Italians, Russian Jews. A fire breaks out and there is panic. Many die, including the two pals’ parents, and their friend Morris. They are rescued by a priest whose thick Italian accent tells us he is also an immigrant. Morris’ father, mourning his son, tearfully asks the boys, “How would you like to come and live with me and be my sons?”

“But I’m not a Jew and neither is Jim.” Mickey Rooney replies.

“Catholic, Protestant, Jew. What does it matter now?”

It is a lovely lesson in brotherly love that is sometimes true even if it is not universal, and our inclination to smile or roll our eyes at such innocence is condescending. The boys become the sons of “Poppa” Rosen, but he is later killed in a riot when he challenges the anti-American speech of a Bolshevik soapbox speaker. We move from a lesson in religious tolerance to Bolshevism is bad no matter if the speaker has a right to say what he thinks.

Years pass, Mickey Rooney grows up to be Clark Gable, and William Powell plays his bookish friend, now a New York City District Attorney. Myrna Loy is Gable’s girl, a world-weary and streetwise sort of moll who yearns for a different life. Gable, called “Blackie” is a gangster. A charming, handsome gangster, but still a gangster.

When she meets Powell, she is impressed with his gentlemanliness absent in the roguish Gable. This is Powell’s and Loy’s first film pairing, and their chemistry led to “The Thin Man” series. At the Cotton Club a singer played by Shirley Ross (who, minus the darker skinned makeup was Bob Hope’s partner in the famous “Thanks for the Memories” song in “The Big Broadcast of 1938”) sings “The Bad in Every Man”, the anthem for this movie, a Rogers and Hart tune which we know more commonly as “Blue Moon.” Apparently the original lyrics weren’t catchy enough, so Lorenz Hart was asked to come up with some new words.

Miss Loy leaves Gable for Powell, becoming his wife. But there are no hard feelings, and Mr. Gable is astoundingly cheerful not only at loosing his girlfriend to his best pal, but pleased almost to the point of giddiness when Powell’s investigations into racketeering threaten Gable’s business deals. He is immensely proud of Powell’s career climb. He is happy for their marriage. Clark Gable is one of the few actors who could pull off the sincerity he is supposed to feel, and even say lines like, “Everything is hotsy-totsy.”

However, trouble looms when Powell is threatened by a bad egg in his administration, and Gable kills the bad egg to help Powell’s bid for Governor. Clark Gable has some interesting scenes with Myrna Loy after she is Powell’s wife. His attention to her is solicitous, and intimate, but not sexually predatory. He exudes genuine affection for her, much more than when she was his ever-waiting girlfriend, almost as if his esteem for her rose only after she left him. The warmth he displays for her when they sit together at the races is among the sexiest scenes he has ever played.

“Do you ever lose?” she kids him when he has won the horse race.

“Yeah, every once in a while.” He charmingly replies, referring to having lost her. He says it without self pity or rancor, and that is adorable.

But the wheels are in motion, and Gable is caught for the murder he committed in a cold-blood by shooting another bad guy in the men’s room at Madison Square Garden. Powell must prosecute him, and while Gable enjoys the courtroom drama, proud of his pal’s integrity, “Class, it’s written all over him,” Powell suffers agonies. In his summation, Powell mentions the long-ago General Slocum tragedy, and he tearfully groans, “I made a boyish effort to save Blackie Gallagher’s life. Today I demand from you his death.”

Gable is given the death sentence, Mr. Powell wins the governorship, dons a wing collar and swallowtail coat, and Loy leaves Powell for what she sees as his fanatic obsession with the law and his lack of loyalty to Gable. He visits Gable in the death house, and the love the two men feel for each other, especially when joined by the Italian priest from their boyhood days, gives us a powerful scene. Powell weakens, and offers Gable a commutation of his death sentence, which Mr. Gable refuses.

“If I can’t live the way I want, at least let me die when I want.”

If such bravado is difficult to believe, then Powell’s remorse that drives him to resign the governorship is even more difficult to believe. He resigns because, as he makes a public confession to the Assembly, his feelings for Gable made him offer the commutation, against the wishes of the public who voted him in office for his very prosecution of his friend. Such scruples, more than a gangster and murder’s admiration for a man with integrity, more than Myrna Loy turning from gun moll to First Lady of New York, more than Clark Gable saying things like “hotsy totsy” stretches our belief. Scruples in public office? Integrity? A social conscience? Yeah, right. Maybe if the former Governor of New York and the present Governor had pencil-thin mustaches, then maybe we could trust them.

Another bit of trivia, well-known by now, is that the real-life gangster John Dillinger had just emerged from Chicago’s Biograph Theater, having seen this film, when he was shot and killed by the FBI.