The 1920s - Then and Now series #2 - The Racket (1928)

The Racket (1928) is surprisingly cynical, even while still coyly presenting what we recognize as frothy 1920s images – including speakeasies, callow youth, and an almost manic desire to rebel. Even those inclined to think that silent movies, by virtue of their being silent, are a bit of a joke will still see much in this movie that is starkly modern and which speaks to us today.

Producer Howard Hughes was only twenty-three years old when he took this on for one of his very first projects in the film industry. It is a story of Chicago gangsters and the honest cop who tries to bring them down. The honest cop, played by Thomas Meighan, one of the most popular leading men of his day, is not so incorruptible that he doesn’t resort to beating up suspects to get the truth. This is, after all, Chicago, and it is, after all, the 1920s. The film makes no explanation and certainly no apology for his beating up suspects in custody, rather it paints him as a savvy hero of the dirty streets he patrols. With the musical score that is now part of the restored film, we see a bit of cheerleading on the side for Meighan with a dash of “The Minstrel Boy” and other Irish tunes when he appears on screen. The gangster, played by Louis Wolheim, says he is, “just a dumb harp.” More on that later.

Louis Wolheim plays Nick Scarsi, a gang leader whose only trouble is women, whom he does not trust, and his younger brother, whom he cannot control. Wolheim commands every scene he’s in, not only because of his imposing size and that craggy boxer’s nose in the middle of his scowling face, but because he was one of the early silent screen actors who somehow figured out that he didn’t need to over emote or to pantomime to excess his feelings to overcome the lack of sound. All he had to do was stand still and raise an eyebrow and all attention was on him. We last saw him here in another great role in Danger Lights (1930) with Jean Arthur.

His kid brother is played by George E. Stone, a typical 1920s youth chaffing at being sent to college and takes every opportunity to rebel against it. His Brilliantine hair, his pencil thin mustache, and his hip flask tell us he is the cat’s pajamas, but he wants nothing more than to ditch college and hang out with his big brother Louis – and the women in the corrupt wards his brother controls who flock to powerful men. Younger brother George E. Stone is not particularly interested in being a gangster; he just likes the idea of sitting around in a nightclub while chorus girls fawn over him because of his brother.

One such is Marie Provost, who plays a chorus girl with the incongruously famous name Helen Hayes. Considering Miss Hayes was well known on Broadway at that time, one wonders why they didn’t bother to change the name, but it brings a chuckle every time I see it on the title card.

Marie Provost is no fool, however, and she’s no shrinking violet. When Wolheim brings his gang and his brother to a private party at a speakeasy, they are in evening dress, the prohibited liquor flowing, and the girls are free and easy. When Miss Provost is rebuffed by Louis Wolheim, who regards all women as poison, she immediately attaches herself to his younger brother. She does it not simply because she knows the younger brother is an easier mark, which he is, but she does it purposely to needle Wolheim. Considering he’s the kingpin of the neighborhood, it’s quite a daring act.

A rival gang arrives and Wolheim is always looking for a showdown but Thomas Meighan and his men quickly take control, though the rival gang leader has been killed. Wolheim and his men are taken into custody over the killing, but they are soon released because Wolheim has a connection with “the old man,” who is a corrupt judge. He arranges for Meighan to be sent to a suburban precinct where the cop will no longer be in his hair. It is a moment of disgrace for Meighan.

Wolheim’s younger brother is cutting capers behind his back and drives around in a jalopy with Marie Provost. He gets a little rough with Marie and she tells him off. He gets in a hit-and-run accident and the pedestrian he hits will later die. Both he and Marie are brought into the nearby police station for questioning. It is Meighan’s new precinct. At first, Meighan is unaware he has his enemy’s younger brother in the lockup.

Three reporters hanging around looking for a story now inject a little levity in the proceedings. Two are hard-boiled veterans, and one is a cub reporter just out of college. He is handsome young John Darrow, and we know he is new at this game because he is very polite, a little nervous, wears his press pass very prominently tucked into his hat band – about the size of a billboard – and instead of a trench coat he wears his college boy slicker with doodles drawn on the back of it in indelible ink. This was one of the great fads of the 1920s, writing doodles and “witty” sayings on raincoats and on jalopies. Darrow made a number of films in the 1920s through the middle part of the 1930s, and then later became a talent agent.

The veteran newshounds tease him a little, but Marie Provost gently vamps the innocent young man to the point where he is so charmed, that when she is locked up in the cell with streetwalkers, he brings her a care package – toiletries and a virginal nightgown. She smirks demurely and this hard gal must have a heart of gold because she does not tease him mercilessly. At the end of the movie, for his own good, she will send him on his way.

The movie is filled with very witty lines, macabre humor and brutal enough to be unflattering enough to all concerned – the police, despite our heroic Meighan; the corrupt district attorney; and the judges – to have this film banned for a time in Chicago, which apparently was not fond of being depicted as a den of political corruption. (The infamous St. Valentine’s Day Massacre would occur only three months after this movie was released.)

Louis Wolheim shoots a police sergeant in his attempt to escape from the station house where he has gone to free his younger brother. The innocent cub reporter helps identify him, solve the crime, and justice prevails. Thomas Meighan, who knows when to kick out the reporters and knows when to use them for publicity, sends them off to write up a story that will put fear in the hearts of other gangs. At the end of the film, he announces he is tired and would like to go to bed but he has to finish the report and mop up this incident. When he’s finished, by morning, he expects it will be time to go to Mass. He smiles, with a glint in his eye, and we are given in this character another stereotyped personification of the Irish cop – quick with his fists but charming as all get-out.

This last scene was, for its day, more daring than it looks.

In an era when immigrants were not as welcome as they had been around the turn-of-the-century – legislation in the 1920s pushed by the Republican-controlled Congress sought to limit immigration severely – the Irish had been in this country long enough to have gained a foothold and climbed in society to positions beyond the police station house, and newer waves of immigration from other countries took the brunt of prejudice.  However, there was still a strong anti-Catholic bias in the country, which with a shift towards conservatism in the 1920s, would defeat Al Smith, the Governor of New York, in his run for the presidency in 1928. Historian William Leuchtenburg in his The Perils of Prosperity 1914-32, quotes the “liberal” Protestant publication Christian Century which remarked regarding Al Smith’s run for presidency that Protestants could not “look with unconcern upon the seating of a representative of an alien culture, of a medieval Latin mentality, of an undemocratic hierarchy and of a foreign potentate in the great office of the president of the United States.”

Mr. Leuchtenburg notes, “Smith was seen as the spokesman for the foreigner, a man, if elected, would flood the nation with a new type of European immigrants...” George Ford Milton, editor and historian from Tennessee, wrote that Smith’s appeal was “to the aliens, who feel that the older America, the America of the Anglo-Saxon stock, is a hateful thing which must be overturned and humiliated; to the northern negroes, who lust for social equality and racial dominance; to the Catholics who would been made to believe that they are entitled to the White House, and to the Jews who likewise are to be instilled with the feeling that this is the time for God’s chosen people to chastise America yesteryear.”

In 1924, four years before this film was released, the Ku Klux Klan had reached the height of its popularity because it was “anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic, anti-Negro, and antiforeigner.” In Birmingham, Alabama, “a Klansman murdered a Catholic priest and was acquitted;” in Illinois “two hours after a monster Klan ceremony a Roman Catholic Church was burned.” This from a chapter the author titles “Political Fundamentalism.” We see its mutations today. When the Klan lost its power, it was largely due to sexual and bribery scandals among its leadership that were unpalatable to Middle America at the time. Murder, brutality, and oppression as expressions of bigotry were apparently okay.

The Racket is fast-paced and frank; it carries very few gimmicks, and the writing is top-notch. It is daring, and was nominated for one of the very first Academy Awards. It began the gangster genre of motion pictures, and for many years was thought to have been lost. It was released in November 1928. The Era of Wonderful Nonsense had one more year to go.

Come back next Thursday, February 15^th when we will discuss two more films from the tail end of the decade: Our Dancing Daughters (1928) and Our Modern Maidens (1929). Both films star Joan Crawford, whom novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald labeled the quintessential flapper. Women had won the right to vote at the beginning of the decade (and it was recorded that many were overwhelmingly supportive of Democrat Al Smith for president); by the end of the decade, so these two movies will have you believe, they were running the show.

For more on The Racket see this terrific post by your friend and mine, Cliff Aliperti, over at his blog, Immortal Ephemera.

For Part 1, the intro to this series, have a look here.

Danger Lights - 1930 - National Train Day

 

“Danger Lights” (1930) is an offbeat amalgam of an Arthurian love triangle and a nuts-and-bolts industrial film.  Never before, or again, I suppose, has a gritty steam locomotive or grimy rail yard lit up the silver screen with such erotic passion. 

This Saturday, May 11, 2013, marks Amtrak's National Train Day here in the U.S., and this is our annual tribute to the iron horse in the movies.

To be sure, the train is the star in this show, but it’s supporting players, mere mortals, round out the cast nicely.  Louis Wolheim plays the manager of a Midwest train yard, a great bear of a man who barks orders, beats up hoboes, but with a gentle side he shows to those in trouble.  Unless they’re hoboes.

Robert Armstrong, who we love in “King Kong” (1933) here, and I think last saw in “Dive Bomber” (1941), plays a smart-aleck ex-engineer down on his luck, currently riding the rails with the hoboes.  He’s a feisty troublemaker, but Mr. Wolheim, after punching Mr. Armstrong’s lights out, gives him a job in these early Depression days, and puts him on the road to redemption.  And romance with his girl.

Wolheim’s girl is the much younger Jean Arthur, fresh-faced and lovely as the doting daughter of a railroad man who can no longer work because of an injury.  Louis Wolheim took them in and looked after them when Jean was a growing girl, and now that she’s grown, he intends to marry her.  Until Robert Armstrong complicates matters.

Frank Sheridan is Jean’s da, who is more in love with his benefactor Wolheim than is shy and diffident Jean.  Mr. Sheridan praises Wolheim to the skies, constantly hammers into Jean what they owe to him, and practically prostitutes his daughter for the sake of paying an old debt.

Hugh Herbert has a small but memorable role as a hobo with delusions of grandeur.

We start the movie with a shot of the engine face-on, barreling towards us.  Many shots have us placed on top of the locomotive or on the coal car facing forward, looking over the locomotive to the track ahead of us as if we are riding the shoulders of a great beast.  We enjoy the sensation of movement in this film, the thrill of a fast ride, over narrow trestles placed across deep river gorges, snaking around hillsides and cutting through winding valleys.  It reminds me of Emily Dickinson’s poem, I like to see it lap the miles:

I like to see it lap the miles,
And lick the valleys up,
And stop to feed itself at tanks;
And then, prodigious, step

Around a pile of mountains,
And, supercilious, peer
In shanties by the sides of roads;
And then a quarry pare

To fit its sides, and crawl between,
Complaining all the while
In horrid, hooting stanza;
Then chase itself down hill

And neigh like Boanerges;
Then, punctual as a star,
Stop--docile and omnipotent--
At its own stable door.

The movie was shot on location in the upper Midwest, much of it at Miles City, Montana, and also in Chicago.

Louis Wolheim was about 50 when this film was released (he died the following year), and was known for his beat-up mug that got bashed in when he played college football.  The story has it that Lionel Barrymore helped him out and advised him to try theater, that his ugly mug—or rather, his face would be his fortune, as they say.  He was a success on Broadway in Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape among other hits, and when Hollywood called, this urbane, multilingual former college math teacher made a career of playing Neanderthal palookas.

It’s an interesting aspect of old movies that the real age of the actors is often ignored, as it is in the case of Jean Arthur, who here plays a much younger woman.  In real life, she was 29 years old with already probably 50 or 60 silent films under her belt.  Robert Armstrong is 40 in real life, hardly the up-and-coming hotshot youth he’s playing.  However, Wolheim’s age, in real life 21 years older than Jean, is brought to our attention and is used truthfully and most poignantly in scenes where we see her discomfort at being pressured into a love match with man to whom she is very grateful, but does not love.

Jean Arthur, far from the sassy roles that would be her trademark in the coming decade, here delicately plays a troubled woman caught in painful dilemma.  She is passive, but no less gutsy for being quiet about it, and she grabs our attention for her very stillness in scenes where Wolheim is blustering, Armstrong is chewing the scenery, and Sheridan is making with the silent movie techniques of agony expressed in a claw-like hand clench.  She is the still waters running deep.

Wolheim’s character is presented to us in ways that keep us off balance.  First, he is a work-obsessed tyrant in the rail yard, “We got to keep the trains moving.  That’s our religion.”  He clobbers people who are slow to do what he tells them.  We may grow tired of Papa Sheridan’s constant praising Wolheim to Herculean status, particularly as we see Jean beaten down by that praise, flinching with guilt because she doesn’t love him.  Wolheim’s tenderness comes out when comforting a fellow railroad man whose wife has just died.  It’s a fine scene, and though we may suffer for Jean, we cannot deny that Wolheim is a good man.  A man everyone looks up to, but whose own love for Jean, though certainly genuine, is expressed with all the passion of patting a dog on the head. 

But Wolheim unwittingly keeps putting Robert Armstrong and Jean Arthur together.  He sends Jean down to the roundhouse with a message for Armstrong, where she meets him for the first time.  A lovely shot where Armstrong watches her walk away, delicately stepping across tracks, from the darkness of the roundhouse to the light-filled rail yard. 

Wolheim invites Armstrong to dinner at the house he shares with Jean and her father, and there is a meet cute with Jean bringing the squalling Armstrong a towel when he has soap in his eyes.  Wolheim is unable to take Jean to a company picnic, so he directs Armstrong to do it.  Finally, at the house party where he announces his upcoming wedding to Jean (Jean looks surprised and slightly sick), Wolheim pushes Armstrong to dance with her.

Robert Armstrong and Jean Arthur begin to fall for each other, but knowing the arrangement with Wolheim, each is careful not to express their love, both feel guilty, both owing something to Wolheim, and both miserable.

That the railroad is part of their forbidden courtship, used as a kind of metaphor to illustrate their passion, is fascinating.  At the company picnic, a nighttime affair, Jean and Armstrong watch breathlessly, awed, in the crowd as two locomotives have a kind of tug of war demonstration to see which is the more powerful.  Plumes of steam huff from the engines and sparks light up the night.

When he walks her home, they take a route through the countryside that brings them across a narrow train trestle perched high above a gorge.  The breeze billows her dress as they walk, stepping gingerly over the railroad ties.  It is a leisurely, adventuresome stroll, testing each other’s company.  Then, horror at a moment’s notice, they hear an approaching train whistle and see a light piercing the tunnel ahead of them.  Armstrong pulls Jean to the side where there is a outcropping platform for just such emergencies.  The train barrels past them, inches away, and the wake of night air whips Jean’s dress and her hair.  Mr. Armstrong’s hair stays nicely put, but then that is what a gallon of Brilliantine will do.

The power, the rumble of the train makes the trestle shake beneath their feet, and they suddenly, passionately kiss.  Such is the orgasmic excitement when a speeding train passes within 18 inches of you.  So it would seem.

When the train has passed and all is quiet, Armstrong pulls away from her and walks quickly away, leaving her there, bewildered and breathless.  We see he feels like a heel.

These scenes, by the way, are all location shooting.  The realism is stunning in an era where we are used to seeing more storybook-type controlled environments.

Another great romantic train shot is when Armstrong, at the controls of a train, glances out the window.  We see from our vantage point on the roof of the locomotive, that it slides by a few old houses built near the tracks.  (As Emily Dickinson might say: "And, supercilious, peer in shanties by the sides of roads...")  One is the house where Jean and her father live.  Next, we are inside the house, and Jean is silhouetted against the open windows facing the track.  Again, the train creates a breeze, even from this distance, sifts through her hair and, quietly captivated, she watches the train slide by.  Armstrong blows his whistle, like a mating call.

 

By the way, he’s pulling a dynamometer car, which is a maintenance car used for measuring a locomotive’s power and speed, etc., and it’s been noted on IMDb and Wikipedia that this is likely the only film in existence of a dynamometer car  for a steam locomotive of this era.

If you’re not as thrilled by that as I am, I don’t want to talk to you.

Mr. Armstrong and Miss Arthur eventually get around to spilling their guts and telling each other how much in love they are, but in the most miserable and guilty fashion.  (They are both half-lying across her bed when this scene takes place, a little pre-Code teasing.)

 

When a track washout pulls Wolheim away from their engagement party, Armstrong and Jean decide to run away.

It’s raining, pouring, like a Capra movie (only the director here is George B. Seitz and I love how beautifully he films this movie).  Jean and Armstrong, pummeled by the torrent, trudge along the tracks (apparently it never occurs to them to walk on a sidewalk), their raincoats shiny in the warning lights along the track.  Danger Lights.

Armstrong gets his foot caught in a rail switch, and wouldn’t you know it?  A train is coming.

There’s a few frantic moments, and then Wolheim catches up to them.  Jean’s da discovered their hanky-panky and squeals to Wolheim, who has arrived with the intention of killing Armstrong.  No need of course, the oncoming train will do that in a matter of moments.

But as we said previously, Wolheim is really a good guy underneath, and he wrestles Armstrong out of the way in time, only to be hit by the train himself.  Or rather, the dummy dressed to look like him is graphically plowed over.

If you’re not squeamish about that, then you’re surely not squeamish about spoilers.  It’s a little late for that anyway.

However, I’ll spare you the ending, except to say that it involves a high-speed mission of mercy to get Wolheim to the medical specialists in Chicago in time.  Armstrong drives the train, and we get a breakneck ride ourselves.  It’s a real treat to find ourselves tearing all over the Milwaukee Road until we at last pull into the yard at Chicago, and even get a few nice interior shots of Union Station.

I’ve been to Union Station in Chicago.  It’s swell.

It you want to see how the operation turns out, “Danger Lights” is now in the public domain and offered here as a free download on the InternetArchive website.

Let me end with a reminder that train travel is the most economic and environmentally friendly way to move people across this great nation of ours.  Make your next trip by train.  Maybe Robert Armstrong will be at the controls.

For more information on National Train Day, have a look at this website.

 

 

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I'll be speaking at the Chicopee Historical Society, meeting at the Chicopee Public Library, Chicopee, Massachusetts on Thursday, May 16th with a PowerPoint presentation about topics from my recently published States of Mind: New England. That book will be available for sale at this event.  Also available in paperback here from CreateSpace.