DVR Diary: THE SECRET BRIDE (1934)

Released at the end of the transitional year from Pre-Code to Code Enforcement, William Dieterle's early political thriller for Warner Bros. has an air of obsolescence about it. Barbara Stanwyck was winding up her studio contract and virtually sleepwalks through her title role, while second-billed Warren William is already a shadow of his proudly predatory Pre-Code self. Whatever interest Secret Bride has is generic; what does a political thriller look like in 1934? This one has some of the paranoid vibe of the classics of the genre, only leavened with very conventional melodrama. The title is a last minute change from the title of the original play, Concealment, to emphasize the melodramatic angle. Stanwyck plays the secret bride of William, the state attorney general. Stanwyck is the governor's daughter, and the couple doesn't want to publicize their small civil ceremony once the public starts clamoring for William to investigate the governor's ties to a corrupt businessman who'd attempted to have an apparent bribe deposited into the governor's bank account. William's crack investigator (Douglas Dumbrille) catches the businessman's nervous secretary (Grant Mitchell) in the act, and new of the businessman's suicide soon follows news of the secretary's arrest. That makes things look bad for the governor (Arthur Byron), despite his denials of financial ties to the dead man. Once the investigation gets under way, William finds in the businessman's paper a letter, signed with the governor's initials, apparently soliciting a bribe. Analysis of the letter and the governor's personal typewriter point to his authorship, despite further denials.

I don't know how typed Douglas Dumbrille had become by the end of 1934, but he was eventually typed as a heel to the point that anyone watching Secret Bride now will automatically suspect that his character is up to no good. That's when the film throws a curve: as Dumbrille picks up his girlfriend, William's secretary (Glenda Farrell, nearly as noncommital in her role as Stanwyck), a shot rings out outside William's home and Dumbrille drops dead. Watching from a window, Stanwyck sees clearly that Farrell, however quickly arrested, didn't shoot Dumbrille. But she can't testify to this effect because -- the horror! -- she'd have to admit that she was at William's house, which would require them to fess up to their politically toxic marriage or face even worse gossip. The only thing to do is find out who shot Dumbrille before Farrell gets convicted, or worse. This means tracking down Mitchell, the increasingly frantic secretary who has to have the key to the multiplying mysteries. Stanwyck convinces him to talk to William, but Mitchell faints and then flees via a fire escape. The chase is on again, but now with Farrell's jury deliberating Stanwyck has no choice but to go to court and exonerate her, however damning the testimony may be to Stanwyck herself, her father and her husband....

There's plenty still unspoilt here, and Dieterle, working from an adaptation co-written by on-camera comic F. Hugh Herbert, spins a slick yarn with an energetic plot despite the lack of enthusiasm among most of the cast. The big exception is Grant Mitchell, who rather easily steals the picture in scenery-chewing support and gives the picture much of its nervous momentum. Dumbrille also does a decent job in an effort to keep his character ambiguous, while Farrell shows some of her Pre-Code spirit in a defiant interrogation scene. But reviewers of the time noted Stanwyck's lack of emotional commitment, while William often seems to vanish before our eyes. Was there something to the story that might have kept the stars interested had the film been made a year earlier, under Pre-Code conditions? It's hard to say, but however disappointing the leads are Secret Bride is still mildly entertaining as a fast-moving conspiracy play. There are worse ways to waste 65 minutes, but later generations knew better how to use this material -- except maybe for the secret-bride part.

If it's from Warner Bros., TCM.com has a trailer.

PRE-CODE PARADE: Warren William in UPPER WORLD (1934)

As the Pre-Code era neared its close and Code Enforcement closed in, the tide was turning against Warren William. Check out the newspaper ad to the left. William is top-billed in the actual film, but yields to Ginger Rogers, erstwhile Warner Bros. gold digger returning in triumph for two 1934 pictures, in the print ads. Setting up Upper World as a Ginger Rogers movie only adds to the slightly Hitchcockian nature of the story conceived by ace playwright Ben Hecht. Roy Del Ruth's picture is no thriller, but it puts William in the position of the basically decent guy who makes some bad decisions and gets deeper and deeper into trouble for them. Upper World sets the tone for another change in the Warren William screen persona. He made good playing a high-powered, high-pressure personality of heroic or antiheroic drive, a figure whose ruthless excess might well be what a depressed country needs. He went astray in pictures like The Mind Reader (as good an entertainment as that one is) and Bedside (just plain bad) that reduced him to a hollow fraud, someone seemingly lacking the internal resources that would justify his bluffs or impostures. For Upper World and his role in the Kay Francis vehicle Dr. Monica later in 1934, William becomes essentially a lonely husband who goes bad, to whatever extent he does, in part because of wifely neglect.

In Upper World William is another captain of industry, railroad tycoon Alex Stream. He's negotiating a big merger that will enrich him further, but he still finds time to play with his young son and the boy's imitative railroad toy set. He'd like more time with his wife (Mary Astor), but she's too involved in playing the society maven. Alex blows off steam on a speedboat, and during one day on the water he manages to fish showgirl Lily Linder (Rogers) from drowning. He grows fascinated with her, going to the show to watch her lead a chorus in a late blast of Pre-Code gusto, "Shake Your Powder Puff," and taking her out to dinner after the Mrs. ignores their wedding anniversary. After one such tryst, his chauffeur (a randy Andy Devine) is caught speeding by a policeman (Sidney Toler). The impatient Alex tries to intimidate the cop with class, but the Officer Moran isn't impressed. Angry, Alex uses his pull with the police to have Moran demoted and transferred. Alex doesn't realize that he's just flung a karmic boomerang toward the horizon, but it'll come back to him with a vengeance later.

Lily has a boyfriend/manager, Lou Colima (J. Carroll Naish) who gets wise to Alex and quickly figures out a blackmail angle. He confronts Alex at Lily's apartment, but the proud tycoon won't knuckle under. He punches Colima to the floor, and the enraged thug pulls a gun. He fires, but kills Lily instead. Ginger Rogers, billed as the star in some advertising, makes her exit about halfway through the film, Psycho style, and it's definitely unusual to see a Rogers character get whacked, even this early in her career. In any event, Alex grabs Lily's gun and kills Colima. Finally, panicking, he tries to arrange things so that the two corpses will appear to have killed each other, but he doesn't notice that Patrolman Moran has been lurking outside Lily's building, noting a parking violation by Alex's car. Noticing Alex leave the building, Moran grows more suspicious. He takes it upon himself to go above his superiors' heads to investigate the shootings. The more he suspects Alex, the less Moran trusts anyone to take his suspicions seriously, even after he catches Alex bribing a janitor (John Qualen) to forget about ever seeing him in the building. When his superior accidentally (?) destroys an important piece of evidence, Moran goes berserk, accusing everyone of conspiring on Alex Stream's behalf. Thrown in jail himself, Moran's only chance is to talk to the ever-vigilant press. Sensing a big society scandal, the reporters listen to the paranoid patrolman and invade the Stream home during a dinner party to ask Alex for his fingerprints. They may have no right to have them, but Alex can hardly say no without admitting something to hide. The noose tightens....

Upper World ultimately opts for a cop-out finish without even giving us the big trial scenes we'd expect. There ought to be a courtroom showdown between Stream and Moran, but the picture leaves the cop in jail. That's too bad, because if Ginger Rogers stole the movie from William in the advertisements, Sidney Toler steals it from him on film. Moran is a brilliantly conceived antagonist, someone who's right for all the wrong reasons, and the plodding, piggish manner that made Toler such an obnoxious Charlie Chan, seems just right for the role with a dash of righteous self-pity thrown in. In a modern movie Moran would probably have gone completely mad and tried to kill Stream before the picture ended. Unfortunately, Upper World ends in a manner unhappily reminiscent of Bedside, with an abject Warren William somehow forgiven by Astor, herself chastened by the realization that her neglect of hubby made him go astray. William may be overshadowed by Rogers and Toler, but he's actually quite good in a role nearly the opposite of his Employees' Entrance character. While that entrepreneurial superman disdained family intimacy, Alex Stream wins sympathy for his simple craving for that same intimacy. Upper World works as long as you feel that Alex doesn't deserve the doom he blundered into or the reckoning Moran has in store for him. If it does work, and I think it does, all the credit goes to Warren William in what was probably his last great Pre-Code role.

Believe it or not, TCM doesn't have the Upper World trailer online. Well, you can't have everything.

PRE-CODE PARADE: Warren William in BEDSIDE (1934)

 

After leading a cohort of Warner Bros. players -- Glenda Farrell and Guy Kibbee went with him -- to Columbia Pictures for Frank Capra's Lady For a Day, Warren William kicked off 1934 back at his home studio with a medical drama directed by Robert Florey. There's almost a world of difference between the two pictures. In Capra's, William is a lovable, indeed an essentially benign rogue out of Damon Runyon, as if Capra saw no difference between Runyon's underworld whimsies (see also Guys and Dolls) and Warners' more hard-boiled stuff. William's Dave the Dude in Lady pulls off a bluff worthy of his Warners characters in convincing visiting aristocrats that Apple Annie the street vendor is a Manhattan grande dame. The bluffs in his Warners pictures were becoming less successful, or at least the studio writers made them increasingly hollow. The Mind Reader had shown that the William character had nothing but his gimmick -- no innate talent, not even a gift of gab, to make his bluff good. Earlier, William played a heroic fraud, even if, as in The Match King, he did reprehensible things. Bedside seems to set William up to play another kind of heroic fraud, but ends up making him an even more ignoble fraud than in Mind Reader. Is it any wonder his star would soon decline?

William plays Bob Brown, an x-ray technician with the sort of bedside manner you'd expect from a Pre-Code picture. He has an adoring assistant (Jean Muir) who wonders why Bob has never pursued his M.D. He's never had the money to finish medical school, he explains, so Nurse Caroline insanely loans him tuition money -- her life savings??? But he doesn't make it to Chicago before blowing the whole roll on gambling. He bluffs, of course, writing letters describing his studies while toiling as a humble orderly. In a crucial scene, he takes the initiative to administer medication to a suffering patient. For his trouble, because he had no authorization and the hospital can't take the risk, he's fired.

From here, Bedside could have become a tale of a Great Impostor, a man with genuine medical talent who only lacks the credentials to save lives. Instead, after returning to Caroline and resuming his x-ray work, Bob looks for the shortest way to success -- he becomes more concerned with the credentials than with acquiring the skills that earn them. His big chance comes when a flustered man (David Landau) stumbles into the office claiming an illness that only a shot of morphine can help. Both Bob and Caroline suspect that the man may be faking his illness to get the dope, and both deduce from his specific orders regarding the injection that he must be a medical man. Inspired, Bob follows the junkie home and learns that he was once Dr. J. Herbert Martell. Bob convinces the man to sell his medical diploma, with a promise of future injections thrown in. He now needs two things to be a success: a real doctor to do most of the work for him, and a press agent. He finds the former in Dr. Wiley (Donald Meek), who's also the inventor of a rejuvenation device. He finds the latter in Sam Sparks (Allen Jenkins) who starts building a reputation for the "recently returned from Europe" Dr. Martell. Sparks's efforts extend to having people shill for the doctor in high-profile public places and having him paged in hotels and sports arenas. The guileless Wiley is happy to take on as much work as "Martell" can dump on him while Martell himself provides the bedside manner that thrills the society ladies. Only the occasional reappearances of the real Martell, badgering him for more money and morphine, complicates Bob's rise to fame.

Caroline grows increasingly suspicious -- why did Bob change his name, after all? -- but is mollified for a while by Bob's assurance that most of his clients are simply hypochondriacs who want attention. His most prominent client is an opera singer who wants him as her surgeon after he diagnoses a flaw in her singing, having overheard a real doctor's opinion moments before. Her trouble doesn't require surgery, but she insists, and to oblige her Bob makes a perfunctory incision in her throat and quickly sews it up, convincing Caroline that no harm has been done. But he can't even do this right and the singer starts hemorrhaging. Not even Dr. Wiley can save her -- but what about his invention? He manages to revive her with his rejuvenation device, but "Martell" gets all the credit. By now, however, while Wiley remains naive, Caroline has seen enough. Despite this latest miracle, time is running out on Dr. Martell. The real Martell circles him like a vulture, eventually becoming a haunting hallucination. The moment eventually comes, with his love's life on the line, when Bob must own up to the truth....

A film like this needs to leave an opening for the protagonist to redeem himself, but Florey and five writers have painted William into a corner and can't get him out. He should have been able to at least contribute to saving Caroline's life with the knowledge he'd acquired long ago, in some echo of that unauthorized intervention earlier in the picture. Instead, he runs about begging other doctors to perform the necessary surgery until they browbeat him into admitting his imposture. After that, he's barred from medical practice and slinks back to his x-ray business -- and for some reason Caroline sticks with him. This is admittedly a realistic finish -- except maybe for the girl standing by him -- but it ends Bedside with a dull flop.  Warren William the heroic bluffer, the big talker, is gone. In his place is Warren William the pathetic loser. What's wrong with this picture? I just explained it to you....but William wasn't through yet by a long shot. His next picture would be another where he takes more than he dishes out, but in it William would become more of a Hitchcockian protagonist, a mostly sympathetic figure who makes one mistake that threatens to destroy his life. Our next picture in the William series is Roy Del Ruth's Upper World, but for now, here's our usual original trailer for Bedside, courtesy of TCM.com

 

PRE-CODE PARADE: Warren William in THE MIND READER (1933)

Roy Del Ruth's follow-up to Employees' Entrance, released just two months later, begins with an implausibility: Warren William can't get himself over as a carny barker. Believe it or not, he and his faithful stooge Frank (Allen Jenkins, who went unbilled as a security guard in the previous picture) can't stir up interest in patent medicines, flagpole sitting, or anything, it seems, until they jealously watch the crowds streaming into a tent for a mind-reading show. Then our Mr. Chandler realizes that a good gimmick is all he really needs. He acquires an additional stooge (Clarence Muse) and sets up shop as Chandra the Great. His is the simplest variation on the racket and the one most dependent upon technology. Muse, done up in eastern-mystic regalia but speaking in his most cultivated voice, collects written queries from the audience. Chandra directs him to dump the queries into a cauldron and set them on fire. With sleight of hand, Muse first turns a knob that drops the papers into Jenkins's waiting hands under the stage. Jenkins then reads the questions into a speaker, and William hears them through an earphone inside his turban. The rest is up to him as he plays up the mysterioso. Having proved his mental powers by knowing the questions without reading them, he can trust that his vague answers will satisfy the marks. This isn't the sophisticated code Tyrone Power uses in Nightmare Alley, nor is there that film's hint that the canny protagonist can do a "cold reading" and impress marks with accurate insights into their personalities. William's character is a complete fraud and depends entirely on his gimmick. This represents a devolution of the Warren William persona from a masterful talker who at least has the gift of gab, but Mind Reader is far from the worst variation on that theme -- we'll encounter that soon enough. The interplay of William, Jenkins and Muse keeps this one entertaining; all three are more or less lovable rogues, and the always-interesting Muse does something rare for a black actor of the period. Blacks were usually relegated to dialect roles, but here Muse gets to play somebody who can put on airs, who can act and speak more classy than he actually is, the truth of his character coming out in his arguments with Jenkins over horse racing. Jenkins, meanwhile, is great as the devil on William's shoulder, the supreme cynic always egging him on to another con.

The trio make a fun team until a girl gets involved. Sylvia (Constance Cummings) starts as an irate audience member -- Jenkins has been taking advantage of the act to do some petty larceny -- but she's won over and starstruck by "Chandra's" apparent psychic knowledge of the whereabouts of some lost money. Soon she's Chandra's girl, and after an initial disappointment when she discovers the truth, an assistant who takes Jenkins's place when he fails to show up one night. Chandra tells her Jenkins must be drunk, but the stooge has an important role to play when the act comes to a town where the cops are tough on "fortune tellers." With the cops waiting to arrest him at the first hint of fraud, Chandra ignores the questions and claims to have a vision of a break-in at a downtown jewelry store. The head cop soon gets word that such a crime is apparently taking place. Chandra becomes a hero for thwarting a major heist -- but it turns out that Jenkins, who'd put a brick through the window as ordered, did keep a trinket. Some challenges can't be brushed off so easily. When a crazed woman (Mayo "Mrs. Humphrey Bogart" Methot) accuses Chandra of driving her old boyfriend to suicide by advising her to dump him, the mind reader has no answer. After she throws herself down an elevator shaft, Sylvia browbeats Chandra into quitting the racket.

Again, without the gimmick Chandler is a failure, this time as a door-to-door salesman. Jenkins has fared better, landing a job as a chauffeur and taking bribes from his boss to keep quiet about the boss's mistress and her love nest. Jenkins rather than William is the mastermind here, coming up with the idea that he and his chauffeur and servant buddies can provide Chandler with inside information that he can sell to society wives as psychic knowledge. When Chandler hesitates, Jenkins reminds him that "the world owes everyone a living." Convinced, Chandler tells Sylvia, now his wife, that he's landed a sales-office job, but opens an office as the psychic "Dr. Munro." The mysterious Munro -- he allows no photographs, soon becomes a gossip-column sensation blamed for numerous high-society divorces. Munro is playing with fire, however, and just as Sylvia grows curious about his daytime habits an angry husband comes to the Munro office seeking vengeance. Not knowing that Sylvia has snuck into the office, Chandler has to kill the husband to save himself and flees, leaving his wife to be framed for the shooting. A heel of heels, he revives the Chandra act with Muse and Jenkins (who has inexplicably quit his chauffeuring job) in tow while Sylvia is put through the legal mill, trying to drown his conscience in booze. Only when he reads through a drunken haze of Sylvia's nervous collapse in court does Chandra break, delivering a debunking denunciation of himself to a confused crowd before hastening home to confess his crime. The film ends with the couple reconciled and Jenkins and Muse seeing our hero off as he starts a two-year stretch in jail -- he did shoot in self-defense, after all. Jenkins has the last word, a timely observation of the irony of his pal's imprisonment just as booze is becoming legal again.

With this, Employees' Entrance and the forthcoming Upper World, a case can be made that Roy Del Ruth is Warren William's best director. Mind Reader is definitely the most stylish of those films, with plenty of dutch-angle shots to keep everything off-balance. If William himself is less masterful here than in his greatest performances, he works his roller-coaster role for all it's worth from rags to riches to rags to riches to rags. This picture tends toward the tragic mode of The Match King, but Jenkins consistently lightens the proceedings despite being the most nearly evil character in the movie. Warners clearly wanted the William character to suffer a fall from grace but the writers may have felt that the utter destruction that ended Match King took things too far. Better if William seems to touch bottom only to rise once more, even if rising means learning his lesson and doing his time. It's a tricky balancing act, and you'd think Chandler would rescue his wife from legal jeopardy sooner than he does. But William's charisma dissipates any outrage audiences might have felt; if he was a star, it was because they wanted to see him win, and during the Depression they weren't too particular about how their heroes succeeded. That William ends up in jail this time only reinforces Mind Reader's comic nature. We enjoy seeing someone get away with stuff so long as he gets his comeuppance later; then the joke's on him. Some of the films we'll see later won't be so funny, and maybe that's why his star started falling.

But now for our usual wrap-up:the original trailer for The Mind Reader from TCM. com.

PRE-CODE PARADE: Warren William in EMPLOYEES' ENTRANCE (1933)

By 1933 the Great Depression had thrown the utility of democracy itself into doubt. Movies reflected that anxiety and a darker longing for a strongman as Americans looked to Italy, then to Germany, or in some cases to the USSR for more effective models of government. Roy Del Ruth's Employees' Entrance comes early in this fateful year and is an adaptation of an older play, but it catches that anxiety for leadership in its ambivalent presentation of Warren William as a strongman of business. His department-store general manager is hard and ruthless, a heel in many ways, but you get the impression just the same that he's a necessary man for the moment, the type the business (if not the country) needs to get through the Depression and on to recovery.

Kurt Anderson (William) rose from nearly the bottom, the shipping department, to his position of power at Monroe's Department Store behind the ineffectual aristocrat owner. Graphics illustrate a surge in sales under Anderson's management until the Depression hits. While the owner tries to inspire his workers, from the remove of his yacht, with inane bromides, reminding them repeatedly that the founder was a descendant of James Monroe and Benjamin Franklin, Anderson grows still more intolerant of failure. We see him break a contract with a supplier whose labor troubles have delayed delivery of an important shipment, despite the supplier's protest that Anderson's action will ruin him. Anderson is unmoved; there's no margin for error now. Nor is there much time to be, as they said back then, "human." The store is his world, and in an almost surreal moment he wanders through the Home department at night, only to find a light on inside a model house. There's someone living there: a homeless newcomer to the city, Madeline Walters (Loretta Young), who thought that squatting would guarantee her the first spot in  tomorrow's line of job applicants. Anderson is more amused than angered, and the girl is pretty. He makes sure she gets a job, after he gets his that night.

Anderson realizes that, to survive, Monroe's must be willing to innovate and experiment. The workers, himself included, must be willing to sacrifice as well, He institutes a pay cut; whoever doesn't like it can quit. Whoever's unwilling to try new sales ideas can quit, if Anderson doesn't fire him first. One old-timer doesn't like a bright idea from young Martin West (Wallace Ford). West has noticed that women are more likely to buy men's underwear than vice versa. Why not sell men's underwear in the women's department? The idea scandalizes the old-timer, but Anderson can't afford not to try something, and he can't afford to keep dead weight like that old-timer on the payroll. Later, the old man comes back to the store and jumps out a window. Meanwhile, Anderson adopts West as a protege, hoping to mold him in his own image. That includes adopting Anderson's total devotion to business, and that means no close personal relationships with the opposite sex. Anderson treats women like objects -- he has another girl (Alice White, a failed studio project who probably gives her best Warners performance here) on the payroll just to seduce and thus distract another of the old fuddy-duddies on the board of directors -- and he urges West to do the same. What Anderson doesn't know is that West has not just fallen in love with Madeline, but married her in secret.

Things threaten to fall apart as the Depression deepens. Anderson's enemies on the board conspire to vote him out of office. Lest you root for that result, the movie makes clear that the coup would put Monroe's in the hands of bankers who would almost certainly ruin it and put everyone out of work. Meanwhile, Martin's secrecy strains his new marriage, until a fight at an office party drives Madeline back for one night into the arms of Anderson. When Anderson finally finds out the truth, he uses the tryst to turn West off  Madeline for good. But when she attempts suicide an enraged West resolves to kill Anderson. Expecting the board to vote him out at any moment -- his allies are desperately trying to contact the at-sea owner to get his proxy votes on their side -- Anderson practically welcomes death, daring Martin to shoot....

We assume now that Pre-Code audiences were pretty sophisticated, even if their product got dumbed down, as far as content was concerned, under Code Enforcement. But I'm not sure if 1933 viewers caught the almost homoerotic vibe I detected in the story. I have to say "almost" because the William character remains a seducer of women, but he's definitely a misogynist and clearly believes he can only have an emotionally satisfying (albeit all business) relationship with another man. In any event, his sexuality, such as it is, is sublimated, his libido transferred to aggressive entrepreneurship except during his rare, random downtime encounters with Madeline. Entrepreneurial aggression and competitiveness turn him on more than anything else. He approves when Martin dresses down a graphic artist whose fashion drawings aren't up to snuff, and he approves even more of that supplier we saw him destroy at the start of the picture. When he discovers the man working a menial job in Monroe's and learns that he's saving money to start a rival business for the sole purpose of destroying Anderson, he offers to invest in the venture. When the man spurns that offer, Anderson gives him a promotion instead, and his rise continues as the film goes on. If the suicide seems to damn Anderson's conduct, this recovery seems to vindicate him. If your alternatives during the Depression are despair or hate, he'll take hate. Something has to motivate people. My hunch is that Depression audiences wanted to see survival, not despair, and they applauded a degree of ruthlessness most often displayed in Warner Bros' pictures, whether by gangsters, gold diggers or the hard-charging hucksters Warren William so often played. In Employees' Entrance he's at his antiheroic height. He convinces the viewer that his course is necessary, even as the picture itself appears to agree that it imposes a cost that some people are understandably unwilling to pay. If that old man's suicide doesn't convince a viewer that William's character deserves ruin, then the picture has probably made its grim point, probably more obvious to its original audience, that not all of us will make it through -- not all of us have what it takes in hard times. There's a kind of consolation in the thought that not all of us need to be as ruthless as Kurt Anderson, that someone like Martin West can walk away, but not all of us have Anderson's responsibilities. Employees' Entrance is a film of its moment in its exploration of what it takes to be a leader when the nation seemed to need leadership more than ever, but still wasn't sure of what it wanted.

The original trailer stresses the heel aspect of the William character, though the film itself is somewhat more evenhanded. As usual, it's from TCM.com



Note: TCM just broadcast another William movie, 1934's Upper World, this very morning, so this Warren William survey, which already had a few films to go, is far from over.

PRE-CODE PARADE: Warren William in THE MATCH KING (1932)

There was a real-life "Match King." Less than a year before Warner Bros. released their pseudo-biopic co-directed by Howard Bretherton and William Keighley, Ivar Kreuger killed himself in Sweden, abruptly ending a storied career that had fallen under suspicion. His kingdom was nearly global in scope; Wikipedia claims that at his peak Kreuger controlled between two-thirds and three-quarters of world match production. Whatever the legal facts of his career, Kreuger seemed to many observers like one of history's great con men. That made him a natural role for Warren William, though since names were changed presumably to protect the innocent, or avoid litigation, William's character was called "Paul Kroll." Changing the name gave Warners license to dramatize, turning the Krueger saga into an ultimate rags-to-riches story, as well as something like an equivalent for the world of finance to the studio's gangster films. The real Krueger's fate cast a shadow on William's characteristically charismatic performance, making The Match King probably the darkest of his Pre-Code starring vehicles.

As a young man Krueger lived in the U.S. for several years. Warnerized, Paul Kroll is first seen working as a sidewalk cleaner outside Wrigley Field (referred to generically as "Chicago Cubs Ball Park") where he and his boss run a con by reducing their workforce without reporting the fact to the Cubs, continuing to collect the ex-workers' paychecks. Though thoroughly Americanized -- William gives no hint of an accent -- Kroll is a son of Sweden and writes fanciful letters home telling of fictional financial success. Finally, he gets word from home that his business expertise is needed to save the family match business. He persuades his girlfriend (an atypically easily duped Glenda Farrell) to give him her savings, ostensibly so they can elope, but actually so he can travel alone to Sweden. Here he shows a gift for entrepreneurial bluster he never employed in America, convincing bankers to loan the match company money on his dubious credentials as a successful American businessman so the company can actually buy out another firm, eliminating competition and imposing economies of scale. This will be Kroll's m.o. throughout: keep growing by borrowing and trusting future profits to pay off his obligations. As he puts it several times over, to the point of monotony, "Don't worry about anything until it happens, then let me take care of it." For a while, it works, and at the same time he works the political game, negotiating for national monopolies in match sales in return for bailout loans often made with borrowed money. In this account it's all a big con with an emphasis on confidence and a core of truth: the businesses he buys do make money. But he never ceases to borrow, and after a while he becomes less concerned with accumulating and more concerned with living large with luxurious women. But a storm is coming, Mr. Kroll....

As a super-huckster, Kroll could almost be a hero. But unquenchable ambition corrupts him, especially after he's frustrated in love. When he learns that a disgruntled former employee has developed a "everlasting match" that could destroy his empire, but has never put the formula for the necessary compound in writing, Kroll has the man put in a lunatic asylum. The Depression proves more difficult to put aside. His match businesses continue to profit hugely -- people still need matches to light cigarettes, ovens, etc., but his constant need for more capital to pay off past loans hits a wall when the banks refuse to lend him more money. He tries a characteristic gambit, announcing a second dividend when most firms are doing without a first, in the hope of impressing the bankers, assuming that they want to make only safe loans. But his happy announcement only convinces the bankers that their money can be used better elsewhere, since Kroll apparently doesn't need it. In increasing desperation, he turns to a counterfeiter who provides him with fake Italian bonds -- and in an unexpected, shocking moment kills the man by dumping him into the water during a speedboat ride. The ruse with the bonds doesn't stand scrutiny, however, and Kroll finally faces a reckoning. Everything comes back to haunt him: he envisions not only himself but his faithful, naive assistant going to jail; the poor inventor raving in the madhouse; the counterfeiter going down for the last time. While Ivar Krueger apparently shot himself in bed, Paul Kroll climbs a balcony ledge and then shoots himself, so he can plunge to the street far below and an observer can say, "He rose up from the gutter, and he died in the gutter."

The Match King may have the most stunning death scene in the Warners canon apart from the unbeatably horrific finish of The Pubic Enemy. It's just not what you expect to see after you've grown accustomed to Warren William's con-man comedies. Even here you could feel that there's something heroic in his hucksterism, since he does save his family firm and his gambles, up to a point, pay off. Whom had he hurt on his way up apart from poor Glenda Farrell back in Chicago, and she was out only a few hundred bucks. But power corrupts -- we just rarely see power corrupt Warren William this badly. Though William was a star by now -- The Mouthpiece had been followed by The Dark Horse, Three on a Match and the M-G-M loaner Skycraper Souls before the end of 1932 -- The Match King is less a Warren William vehicle (I could see Edward G. Robinson doing it, too) than a slow-burning Depression-era indictment of the financial practices (and the motives behind them) presumed responsible for the world's economic disaster. It's a disquieting film because it shows us a typical, arguably lovable Warren William rogue turn into an outright monster. His characters usually face a fall after their rise, but it usually results only in his learning a lesson and changing his ways. We respect his drive too much, most of the time, to want to see him pay the ultimate price for his hubris. Here, however, while following the real-life Krueger model, he dies in the broadest sense for Wall Street's sins ... but when we next see him in this survey William will be nearly his most masterful as a man who withstands the Depression -- but at what cost to his heart?

If it's a Warner Bros. picture we have the trailer -- or to be correct, TCM.com has it.

PRE-CODE PARADE: Warren William in THE MOUTHPIECE (1932)

 

Within a year of arriving at Warner Bros. in 1931, a decade after his first failed attempt at Hollywood success, Warren William was a star. He became an archetypal Pre-Code personality, and that persona was largely shaped by The Mouthpiece, co-directed (or directed successively) by James Flood and sometime-actor Elliot Nugent. Mouthpiece typed William as an aggressive trickster, one of the era's arch con-men, a guy who could put anything over with an intimidating gift of gab. His movies usually follow a meteoric story arc with William rising from nearly the bottom to starry heights, often through bluster and bluff, before receiving a comeuppance that could be redemptive or damning, depending on the movie's message. He was an ambiguous model of success during the Depression, often displaying superhuman drive that spilled over into sexual aggression, when his sexuality wasn't distorted by material ambition, while appearing to affirm a cynically comforting or crusading conviction that successful people often cheated their way to the top. In some of these pictures, he starts out as a well-meaning or at least harmless person, only to leave the impression that success itself, perhaps when it becomes an end unto itself, corrupts the successful. The Mouthpiece is a good example of what I mean.

William plays Vincent Day, a successful prosecutor whose world falls apart when he learns that a condemned prisoner he'd prosecuted is innocent but has been executed moments before a reprieve could reach the prison -- the rest of the picture couldn't have taken place in the age of the cellphone. Vince apparently made an honest mistake and is crestfallen, renouncing prosecution to become a defense attorney. In this field he is not successful, but a friendly bartender (a broguing Guy Kibbee) tries to set him straight. The real money is in defending the guilty, not the innocent. Taking that advice, Vince has a courtroom epiphany when he discredits a prosecution witness, a boxer who boats that he can't be knocked out under any circumstances, by flooring him as he leaves the witness stand. Here Vince learns the value of showmanship and grows more cynical and self-interested about his profession. A typical day has him saving an embezzler from prosecution in return for a third of the takings and saving himself from arrest by producing the employer's written refusal to prosecute and earning the employer a reprimand from the district attorney. His ultimate coup comes while defending an accused poisoner (J. Carroll Naish). With the vial of poison Naish allegedly used available as a prosecution exhibit, Vince persuades the jury that his client is innocent by guzzling the liquid as Naish himself looks on in horror. He knows that's real poison, but Vince has made a very carefully calculated risk. He knows (as the prosecution, implausibly, doesn't) exactly how long the poison takes to take effect. He bets his own life that the jury will be so impressed by his stunt that they'll acquit Naish almost instantly. He wins that bet and makes it back to his office to have his stomach pumped (in a nice tracking shot) with time to spare.

Vince faces a more grave moral dilemma later. He's been lusting after his pretty new stenographer (Sidney Fox from Murders in the Rue Morgue) while ignoring the obvious affections of his top secretary (Aline MacMahon), but she loves a younger man and comes to despise Vince after learning the truth about the poison stunt. She's going to leave with the boy, a bond salesman, and start a new life away from the bad old city, but one of Vince's gangster cronies happens to rob the poor guy of his bonds while leaving the kid vulnerable to the charge that he stole the bonds himself and made up the robbery story to cover himself. You can tell that Vince is tempted to let this happen, but chivalry prevails. Claiming that the crooks owe him a favor, he demands that the perp confess in return for a promise of the lightest sentence possible. No dice, but if Vince rats the man out his own future will be in jeopardy....

I don't know how the labor was divided behind the camera, but Mouthpiece looks pretty seamless and while neither Flood nor Nugent plays for the Warners A team of directors, they give the picture the characteristic studio snap. It's a perfect picture for putting an actor over and William takes advantage of every opportunity. His persona would be refined further in later pictures, however, and there's a rough-draft quality to Mouthpiece compared to the comedies and grim morality tales to come. The big negative for me is the poison scene; it's so implausible that no one on the prosecution side, or even on the jury, would ask the most fundamental question about how long the poison takes to work that it nearly takes you out of the picture. But I suppose it's not inconsistent with the general Pre-Code attitude toward law-enforcement and authority in general, which is that the establishment is pretty stupid. From the perspective of the Depression, you can hardly blame moviemakers or moviegoers from taking that attitude or even rooting for characters like those William played who took what they could get however they could get it -- up to a point.

This is the first of a series of William reviews based on a weekend's viewing of the films shown on Turner Classic Movies on August 30th. While you wait for the next installment -- and there'll be some other reviews in between -- here's what I wrote about William last December, the last time TCM dedicated significant time to the great man.

And thanks to TCM as usual, here's the trailer for The Mouthpiece.