I like College Coach; it’s fast-moving, the cast is top-notch (in addition to O’Brien and Dvorak and my father, it has Dick Powell, several of the excellent Warner Brothers character actors, and an uncredited cameo by a young John Wayne), and the details of the university’s financial woes, real estate deals, and football cheating scandals are still fresh today. My father, getting a break from the gangsters he so often played in those years, is very funny as Buck, the vain quarterback who romances the coach’s wife. (This was the movie in which Wellman had encouraged the college football players to pile onto the unsuspecting Lyle.) But there’s no doubt that it’s an odd film. It plays like an exposé of gridiron corruption, but it doesn’t end that way.
Lyle in William Wellman’s College Coach, with John Wayne (left) and Dick Powell (center).
20,000 Years in Sing Sing, one of my father’s favorites of his own movies, at first seems like it will come to a more conventionally just conclusion. The cocky gangster played by Spencer Tracy is executed. But it is punishment for a crime he did not actually commit, and it is meted out at a prison whose warden, the movie’s hero, hates the death penalty. This was a movie that critics at the time liked and praised for its realism. “In this rapidly paced film,” read the New York Times review, “there are some extraordinarily interesting glimpses of prison routine.” Variety called the prison scenes “near perfect,” and added, “There’s everything in this picture to make class entertainment.” My father, who played Tracy’s fellow con, remembered the movie fondly, too, in large part because it stood out for its backstory; even with his excellent memory, it was hard, fifty and sixty years later, to keep straight all the movies he had made in rapid succession in the early 1930s. The film is based on the story of Lewis Lawes, the crusading warden of Sing Sing prison in upstate New York from 1919 to 1947. Lawes was an anti–death penalty progressive, with a strong faith that the right sort of prison, one that treated all inmates humanely and rewarded them for good behavior, could redeem people. At Sing Sing, he improved the food, health care, and recreation; promoted liberal parole and probation policies; built airy new cells; encouraged inmates to make and tend a garden and greenhouses; and provided other meaningful work. To show how much he trusted his “boys,” Lawes let inmates take care of his daughters, and submitted himself to a daily shave at the hands of a prison barber who had once cut a man’s throat.
Lawes was a technical adviser on the movie and allowed some of the scenes to be shot at Sing Sing, with real prisoners in them, which did indeed give parts of the movies a touch of documentary verisimilitude. And Lawes was fairly pleased with the finished product—especially the performance of Spencer Tracy as the dapper gangster who enters Sing Sing impudent as can be but develops a grudging respect for the fair-minded warden. Of course, the script took plenty of liberties, too. It was a melodrama and it was written by Wilson Mizner, the confidence man turned screenwriter. My father admired Lawes, though, and was proud to be in a film about his reforms.
Michael Curtiz, the Hungarian-born director who went on to make Casablanca, concocted an effectively gloomy atmosphere out of the location shots he got, the shadows cast by prison bars, and the song “Happy Days Are Here Again” played for ironic counterpoint on the harmonica. My father, like a lot of actors, found Curtiz overbearing and intimidating, and was alternately baffled and amused by the director’s fractured English. “Bring on the empty horses,” was Curtiz’s way of asking for riderless horses in a scene. On the set of 20,000 Years in Sing Sing, Curtiz once barked at Lyle: “Come when I don’t say stand still!” a piece of direction that had him perplexed for a long moment.
Lyle and Spencer Tracy, in 20,000 Years in Sing Sing.
My own favorite of my father’s pre-Code movies, though, is a movie called Three on a Match, in which he appeared with Joan Blondell, Warren William, Ann Dvorak, and Bette Davis. In his book Sin in Soft Focus, the film historian Mark Vieira calls Three on a Match “the quintessential Warner Brothers film of 1932, cramming headlines, history, sociology, sex, alcohol, drugs, adultery, kidnapping, blackmail and suicide into 63 busy minutes.” To me, it’s the quintessential pre-Code movie, remarkable for its frankness about drug addiction, its sympathy for the sensuality and frustration of the doomed wife, its upending of the clichéd fates it seems to set out for the three women at the center of the film (the reform school bad girl turns out to be the happiest and most moral of the three women; the refined rich girl, the most miserable), and an ending that still has the power to shock.
A Warner Brothers picture rarely risked boring an audience with psychological exposition, but for that reason the emotional states of characters were often telegraphed with a concision that bordered on the absurd. The performances in Three on a Match—particularly those of Ann Dvorak as the straying wife and Lyle as the handsome low-rent chiseler she strays to—are excellent, and they add an emotional shading you don’t often get in the Warner Brothers movies of the era. There’s one scene in particular that is a model of potent, emotional brevity. It shows us, eloquently if not graphically, that Vivian, the Ann Dvorak character who has left her wealthy straight-arrow husband for Mike, my father’s character, is a woman who is now having satisfying sex, probably for the first time in her life. The opening of the scene cuts from a shot of the abandoned husband, played by Warren William, his large white hands twisting in distress as he talks about his missing wife and young son, to one of Lyle’s hands wrapped around a cocktail shaker. The camera pulls back to show a hotel room in which Vivian is lying on a sofa wearing a filmy peignoir, a dreamy, postcoital smile on her face. When her little boy toddles over and says, “Mommy, I’m hungry,” Vivian’s besotted satiety leaks into her response. She coos ineffectually at him and gestures to a decimated tray of hors d’oeuvres. “I don’t like those anymore,” whimpers Junior. “Can’t I have bread and milk?”
At this, a small spasm of conscience passes over Mike’s face. Lyle does something subtle with his expression that is not quite a wince, not quite an admission of shame—something shifty-eyed—and is a very nice piece of acting. We see in an instant that as weak and hedonistic as Mike is, he isn’t heartless. But Vivian is too blissed out to notice. “C’mere,” she murmurs to her lover, then pulls him to her on the couch and whispers something in his ear; a cigarette burns between her long white fingers as they kiss.
In her autobiography, Bette Davis remembered Three on a Match as a “dull B picture.” Her role, as a dutiful stenographer and friend, was certainly thankless. In 1932, Davis was a contract player at Warner Brothers, doing what she was asked but already beginning to chafe at the restrictions. In Three on a Match, she has scarcely any memorable business other than the requisite pre-Code scene of a woman getting dressed or undressed with blithe irrelevance to the plot. (In this one, Davis as the prim stenographer happens to be wearing a skimpy nightie and pulling stockings up over her bare thighs during one important conversation.) Nor did Davis particularly impress the film’s director, Mervyn LeRoy. “They gave me three unknown girls in that one—Joan Blondell, Bette Davis, and Ann Dvorak,” LeRoy wrote in his autobiography. “I made a mistake when the picture was finished. I told an interviewer that I thought Joan Blondell was going to be a big star, Ann Dvorak had definite possibilities, but that I didn’t think Bette Davis would make it. She’s been cool to me ever since.”
Of the three women, it is certainly Dvorak’s Vivian who haunts you. Dvorak was as unusual an actress as Davis, and in a way just as rebellious. If she’d had as long a career, she might have enjoyed Davis’s stature instead of having her greatest moments remain in pre-Code movies like Scarface and Three on a Match. Her beauty was sophisticated and vaguely Eastern European; she looks like an art student—slender, eternally modern, and hip, a girl you’d see in a coffeehouse in Prague or Vienna, nibbling at a Sacher torte with a table full of argumentative intellectuals. Dvorak brought a skittish intelligence and a yearning sexuality to her best performan
ces. With her pale complexion, unruly hair, and tendency to dark circles under her eyes, Dvorak was also one of the few actresses of the period who could look persuasively strung-out. But she defied the studio by fleeing Hollywood for England and a yearlong honeymoon with her British husband. Her career never really recovered, and she retired from the screen in 1951.
Lyle on the set of Three on a Match, with Ann Dvorak, the director Mervyn LeRoy (holding the script), and cinematographer Sol Polito.
In Three on a Match, Dvorak and Lyle infuse their mutual downfall with a palpable sense of panic. Hitting up an old friend for money, Dvorak wears a black suit rubbed shiny in places, taps her scuffed shoes, and picks at her cuticles; all the languor is gone. Her skin has a milky-blue pallor, and she somehow manages to make her refined slenderness look more like gauntness. Lyle, who owes money to a mobster and concocts a nasty scheme to kidnap Vivian’s son after the boy has returned to his father, develops a convincingly clammy sheen and an expression compounded of terror and childish ingratiation.
When he brings the boy home to Vivian, who knew nothing about this kidnapping plot, it’s clear that she has become an addict. It could be heroin she’s hooked on, but it’s probably cocaine. She’s jumpy; and she wipes her nose compulsively with her knuckle—a gesture that one of the gangsters who is now hanging around, angling to get in on the ransom money, cruelly imitates. (He’s played by a cold and menacing young Humphrey Bogart.) When one of the other thugs asks Bogart’s character, “Did you get anything for her? She’s clean out of it,” he snaps back, “How could I? I tell you the heat’s on enough to curl your shoe leather.”
Meanwhile, the police are looking for the boy, and the dragnet is closing in. Vivian is trapped in the bedroom of a run-down tenement apartment. Junior, who is locked in the room with her, looks grimy and neglected. Mike is holed up in the outer room with a few of the thugs. Early 1930s movies didn’t generally use much musical underscoring to cue emotion; if you hear music, it’s usually being played on a phonograph or radio and heard by the characters as well. (In Warner Brothers movies, it’s often “St. Louis Blues.”) So in this scene all that we’re hearing are ambient sounds, and they are stark. Sirens wail. Vivian is in withdrawal and you can hear her moaning from behind the closed door.
In short order, Bogart’s character decides the kid will have to be killed, then the gang will flee and still try to score the ransom. This is a rather amazing plot development, particularly in the same year that the Lindbergh baby was kidnapped and found dead. Jason Joy of the Code’s Studio Relations Committee was certainly taken aback. “I’m frank to say I’m at a loss what to say about it,” he wrote to Darryl Zanuck at Warner Brothers. “While there has been no signed agreement among the studios not to make child-kidnapping pictures, the general impression here has been that no one would follow the Lindbergh tragedy with a picture dealing with the kidnapping of a baby for ransom.” The state censorship boards were up in arms over the picture, and New York investors were worried it would kick off a cycle of similar movies. In any event, Three on a Match was released in 1932, and with few changes—evidence of how weak the system was before Joseph Breen took it over. But in 1937, Breen would deny permission for it to be re-released and nixed a proposed remake, despite its softer approach. Indeed, kidnapping, especially child kidnapping, would for many years be an entirely forbidden subject in films. So would drug addiction, for that matter.
In the final, sad, and suspenseful scenes of Three on a Match, Mike dies resisting the Bogart character’s order to kill the boy and Vivian dies to save him. Having scrawled her son’s location in lipstick on her chest, she leaps from the window to the sidewalk below. At the close of the movie, Junior is seen with Warren William and Joan Blondell, the good bad girl to whom he’s now married, saying his bedtime prayers and remembering his mommy in heaven. What’s unexpected, and touching, is that his father and stepmother have not tried to expunge her from their story or from the boy’s memory. The film scholar William K. Everson, who calls Three on a Match “a vivid little picture,” “splendidly cut and paced,” suggests that it was the kind of movie that offered audiences of the early Depression years a surprising solace: “Like so many early ’30s movies, the milieu is realistically that of the Depression, but it offers a kind of inverted escapism by showing that the rich have more than their share of woes, and that real problems spring more from human weaknesses than economic ones.” If so, it made those points with more bitterness but also more compassion than most movies of its ilk.
In the years to come, it would be rare indeed to see a major studio release as dark as Three on a Match. In part that was because such an outlook would not pass muster with the Code enforcers. But that wasn’t the only reason. When Franklin Roosevelt won the presidency in November 1932, it brightened the outlooks of many Americans—not least the Hollywood producers, and among them, none more than the Warner brothers, whose commitment to Roosevelt and his New Deal was passionate and sudden. It was true that Warner Brothers was the studio whose films displayed the most social conscience. But much of that came from the writers—“Schmucks with Underwoods,” Jack Warner called them—newspapermen and novelists, many of them New York Jews. As Neal Gabler writes, “poor young educated Jews growing up in New York in the twenties and thirties,” which so many of the screenwriters were, came to Hollywood hardwired with sympathy for the underdog. At Warner Brothers, they were especially likely to thrive, and to inflect their scripts with their political conscience. Still, the Warners themselves had been Republicans, as were most Hollywood producers at the time. Gabler thinks that as first- or second-generation Jewish immigrants, they were anxious to ally themselves with the moneyed WASP establishment in this country. In Los Angeles, they tended to take their political cues from the conservative newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. They rallied to defeat Upton Sinclair’s 1932 campaign for governor—a populist movement known as End Poverty in California—going so far as to create fake newsreels that showed Sinclair-loving hoboes overrunning California and a disreputable-looking, thickly accented Russian immigrant declaring his support for the progressive novelist.
It’s a little hard to account for the Warners’ embrace of FDR. Maybe they were convinced he was the man to fix the economy; maybe they merely spotted a winner and saw a chance to get on the inside track and become the political machers in Hollywood they’d never really been. In any case, in 1932, Jack’s brother Harry called him to New York for a meeting with advisers to then Governor Roosevelt, along with Joseph Kennedy, Al Smith, and John Raskob, the former General Motors chair and now chair of the Democratic National Committee. Roosevelt’s people had identified the Warners as the disgruntled outliers in the Hollywood establishment and saw a chance to win them over. Jack recalled looking at his brother for some clue to this political switch and getting this reply: “The country is in chaos. There is revolution in the air, and we need a change.” Jack thought it wasn’t a very original battle cry, but he had to admit, as he put it in Warnerese, “The Depression had a half nelson around the nation’s already scrawny neck.” He dutifully went home to try to muster the Hollywood troops for Roosevelt. In September 1932, the Warners paid for a spectacular electrical parade and sports pageant at the Coliseum, where Roosevelt was the guest of honor and some 75,000 people turned out. “Roosevelt Thrilled by Dazzling Pageant of Filmland,” trumpeted the headline in the Los Angeles Examiner.
After Roosevelt was elected, Warner Brothers pictures often came equipped with endings in which the New Deal swept in at the last minute to save the day. In William Wellman’s fine movie Wild Boys of the Road (1933), middle-class teenagers become rail-hopping hoboes after their parents lose their jobs. Out on their own, they endure hunger, rape, pitched battles with the police, the destruction of their peaceful encampment, and a train accident that leaves one boy an amputee. At the end, they are brought before a judge who turns out to be a sympathetic figure, and who is shown with the Nat
ional Recovery Administration eagle behind him. He refuses to put the kids in jail and reassures them that “things are going to get better all over the country.” In another 1933 film, Wellman’s Heroes for Sale, the protagonist is a World War I veteran who endures a calvary that begins with a rich friend’s claiming the military honors that rightly belong to him, and proceeds through morphine addiction, unemployment, a machine-smashing uprising by his workers when he briefly rises to be a factory boss, and baseless hounding by the Red Squads. The last scene finds him a hunted man and hobo, taking refuge with others like him in a dark, rain-swept gully. But unlike the character in I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, he offers hope: “Did you read President Roosevelt’s inaugural address? It takes more than one sock in the jaw to lay out 120 million people.” In the musical Footlight Parade, the chorus holds aloft flash cards that form the shape of the NRA eagle and of FDR’s smiling face.
It was this kind of spirit that put Lyle on a train bound from Los Angeles on February 21, 1933, to the inauguration of Franklin Roosevelt in Washington, D.C. The train was a magnificent thing—covered in silver and gold leaf, decked out with electric lights that burned continuously and spelled out “Better Times” and “The 42nd Street Special.” The movie 42nd Street, which had just come out, was a Busby Berkeley musical about an imperious producer hit hard by the stock market crash but rallying himself and his cast to put on a fabulous show. It was the prototype of all future backstage musicals, complete with the plucky chorus girl called to stardom when the leading lady collapses. It was also an obvious, if somewhat peculiar, Depression parable: “a giddy extravaganza about economic desperation,” as the writer James Traub describes it. Lyle had a small part in the movie that was cut from the final version. His main contribution to the film was doing the excitable voice-over for the preview. But no matter: he was on the train anyway, along with the actors Bette Davis, Glenda Farrell, Leo Carrillo, Preston Foster, Laura LaPlante, and Claire Dodd; the comedian Joe E. Brown; the cowboy star Tom Mix and his horse, Tony Jr.; the Olympic swimming champion Eleanor Holm; the boxer Jack Dempsey; and twelve beautiful chorus girls (the latter the kind of group that is inevitably described as a “bevy”). The train would be stopping in thirteen cities, and it would arrive in Washington, D.C., on March 4, in time for the stars to join the inaugural parade and attend an inaugural ball or two.
The Entertainer Page 19
