Child of Manhattan

Enjoyed this story of a girl named Madeleine McGonegal, played by Nancy Carroll, who was a girl who worked in a dance hall where the purchase of a ticket allowed you to dance with a girl of your choosing. This dance hall is owned by a very wealthy man named Paul Vanderkill, (John Boles) who once a week visits his establishment to see that things are running according to his rules of conduct. Boles meets up with a dance hall girl named Madeleine McGonegal and is interested in her down to earth personality and her being so outspoken and honest about herself. Madeleine does not realize John Boles is her big boss and that he is very wealthy and gets worried when he starts buying all kinds of expensive gifts. As the story progresses, Madeleine expects a baby and that is when the entire story changes and the drama begins and takes a new change in their marriage. Great acting by Nancy Carroll and John Boles and you will see Betty Grable, (Lucy) giving a great supporting role. Enjoy

"Child of Manhattan" (1933) stars Nancy Carroll who is in nearly every scene of the film. Her co-star is John Boles, and then there is a lesser co-star who, believe it or not, is Charles "Buck" Jones - yes, the Western "B" movie star. Of course his Westerns are basically "A" films in the early years of his prominence at Columbia, but they're made for the audience that preferred the oaters to the "womens'" pictures or romantic "mush". "Child of Manhattan" is drama, romance, melodrama, social register, social commentary on mores, etc. It's 70 minutes of stirring the stew in the pot, and it certainly isn't any great shakes, but it's a fun watch. The ending is too sudden, even though we can figure it will end that way. By the way, no way it would end this way; okay, maybe one in twenty-five...maybe. Carroll is a dancer in a dime-a-dance joint, a business in a building owned by Boles' family. He's unaware it's even there, or his, but he goes to see it. His mother thinks it's disreputable. Boles and Carroll find each other. In the past, Western-type Jones had fallen for Carroll and even asked her to marry him. She's so far refused. Suddenly she finds herself pregnant with Boles' and her baby. She marries Boles. But she doesn't want to strap her husband into what she assumes is an unwanted marriage. SO - - - she goes to Mexico to get a divorce. Enter Luis Alberni as a lawyer. He's the very, very light-weight comedy, too. I won't divulge what happens from here on out. You can surely figure it out in your head. Just look at the cast...

Decent little meller, without much meller. Much more romance. There's the large dollop of social commentary. Even some Depression material (very little!). I liked it enough to give it a 6 out of 10 score on the movie love/hate gradation scale. Carroll herself is very good in this. Boles does things by rote. Buck Jones is Buck Jones is Buck Jones. I enjoyed watching him do something like this. It's the kind of part that just a year later (and even a couple of years earlier) would have been played by Ralph Bellamy. There, now I've given away a lot of what I didn't say before. Along for the ride in this are Jessie Ralph, Clara Blandick, Jane Darwell, Warburton Gamble, and even, if you look hard enough, Betty Grable. Nat Pendleton and Matthew Betz are prominent in one or two little scenes, too.

... because I recognize his trademark wit in some of the one liners. I can also see how some material may have gotten lost in translation while adapting it to the screen.

Paul Vanderkill (John Boles) manages his family's extensive New York City real estate holdings. His aunt Sophie drops by one day and is horrified that the Loveland Dance Hall is renting out some of their real estate. Paul says he will investigate and ensure that the place is decent. You can tell this really doesn't trouble him, he just wants Aunt Sophie humored and out of the way. It turns out it is one of those "ten cents a dance" places that were common during the Great Depression.

When Paul arrives at the dance hall, he first encounters Madelaine (Nancy Carroll). He wants to ask some questions about the place. Why he doesn't go straight to the manager is unclear, except that maybe he wants a straightforward explanation and figures he's more likely to get one from one of the girls who works there, plus we'd have no story if he simply talked to management. Madelaine gets the idea that the Paul is poor. He doesn't correct her impression, and he is surprised by her generosity to someone to whom she doesn't believe has much. He buys enough dance tickets to cover the entire evening and leaves with her. At this point she begins to realize he is not poor.

It's fun watching them have difficulties with each other's speech patterns. Paul has the remains of his Dutch ancestors' accent. Madelaine has a working class New York vocabulary.

"Did you call me a witch? For a minute I thought you said something else!" And so on.

The two get to know each other and fall in love. But Paul doesn't want to get married because - reasons. It really isn't clear. He keeps talking about having "a daughter with modern ideas" and that he doesn't want any scandal to touch her. How marrying Madeleine is scandalous is either some lame excuse not to get permanently entangled or it is really insulting because deep down he considers her beneath him and THAT would be a scandal in his estimation. It is never explained. Nor do we ever get a glimpse of this modern daughter of his.

So what happens when two people live together in 1933 when there is no birth control? I imagine you can figure out what happens. How both people handle the situation - watch and find out.

Preston Sturges was never one to humor illusions about noble poverty. Madelaine's family is what you'd expect of a group of people who are weighed down by a lifetime of poverty and the more severe and recent Depression. Mom is coarse, untrusting, and definitely not nurturing. Dad is probably dead but unmentioned - maybe he ran off. Her brother is a layabout and a moocher. Her younger sister has just one scene where she cries.

And there are characters who wander in and out of the film. I've mentioned Madelaine's family - they disappear during the second half never to be seen again. Instead, up pops Maddy's Aunt Minnie (Jessie Ralph) who is everything Maddie's mother is not - supportive, nurturing, and generous. Wherever did she come from? It is never explained.

It would be nice to have more information on the source material, because there are holes in the plot and in the cast that might be explained in Preston Sturges' play. I'd recommend this because John Boles is a much better actor than his early talkie song bird reputation would have you believe, and Nancy Carroll always grabs my attention. Her career would have gone on much longer had she not been so hard to get along with on the set. She did, though, have a very successful stage career and then made numerous guest appearances on TV as well.

I admit I obtained this film because I wanted to see John Boles' performance (he's always been a heart throb of mine) but it was Nancy Carroll's superb and sensitive performance of a common dance hall girl from Brooklyn with a heart of gold which kept me watching, especially considering the poor quality of the print I obtained.

With this multi-faceted performance Nancy proved she was capable of much more than silly flapper roles. Her character is not self-serving in the least, while John Boles' character Paul is indecipherable. After admitting he is totally in love with the dance hall girl he then states he doesn't want to marry her. An unexpected pregnancy forces his hand and he does the honorable thing by marrying her, but the marriage is a secret one. We are to assume it was to protect his older daughter, but since we never see this daughter we don't have much sympathy for Paul's concerns.

The audience receives a typical happy Hollywood ending in Child of Manhattan but somehow it doesn't quite fit the sum total of the film.

Watch Child Of Manhattan (if you can find it) to see Nancy Carroll at her best.

Update: TCM has recently broadcast this film in a lovely print. That's the one to see.

It isn't easy to track down this movie, but it's worth the effort if you're a Preston Sturges fan and would like to see what his work looked like early on, when he was still in the process of finding his voice. Sturges first made his name as a writer in 1929, with his smash hit Broadway comedy Strictly Dishonorable. Unfortunately, he went on to produce three flops in a row after that, before leaving New York for Hollywood. There he regained his bearings and ultimately became a master of sophisticated farce comedy -- but for the movies, not the stage. Child of Manhattan was the second of Sturges' three Broadway failures, though according to the various books about the author it wasn't really such a terrible flop: it ran for 87 performances, which wasn't so bad in those days. The reviews were poor however, and the stage run didn't recoup its investment. After the show closed the play's primary financial backer sold the material to Columbia Pictures, but for convoluted reasons Sturges didn't earn a penny from the movie version. Still, watching the results today we can see that the experience wasn't a total loss for the author, for it's clear that he used this somewhat rickety vehicle to explore themes he would develop more fully later on. His fans will recognize and enjoy the comic passages in the dialog, which suggest a workshop version of Sturges' great screenplays of the '40s, delivered by embryonic versions of the eccentric characters he would later polish to perfection.

Child of Manhattan tells the story of Madeleine McGonegal (Nancy Carroll), a taxi dancer who works at a dime-a-dance club called Loveland, which happens to occupy land owned by one of New York's wealthiest men, Paul Vanderkill (John Boles). Vanderkill is a middle-aged widower and an absentee landlord where the club is concerned, but one evening he visits to see if the place is as wicked as its reputation suggests. He meets Madeleine and finds her strangely innocent and charming, despite the tawdry setting. He romances her, buys her expensive clothes, then sets her up in an apartment as his mistress. You know you're watching a Pre-Code movie when an extramarital sexual relationship is presented in such a straightforward fashion. Vanderkill buys his new girlfriend lavish gifts in a sequence that must have represented a wish fulfillment fantasy for Depression era viewers, and which contrasts sharply with Madeleine's harsh encounters with her shanty Irish family, who bluntly express their disapproval of her new mode of life.

When Madeleine gets pregnant she's apologetic, which I found confusing, frankly; why was it HER fault? (Doesn't it take two?) It's briefly implied that Paul might arrange to have the pregnancy terminated, but instead he offers marriage on condition that it remain a secret. The plot takes several more twists from that point forward, but let it suffice to say that although the tone of the story grows darker, Sturges manages to perk things along with amusing character turns by familiar supporting players Jesse Ralph, Luis Alberni, and Tyler Brooke. Brooke is especially funny in a scene that is the film's comic highlight, Paul and Madeleine's trip to a fancy clothier's on Fifth Avenue called Madame Dulcey's. Brooke, who plays the proprietor of the shop, leaves no doubt about his sexual orientation as he waxes eloquent on the "too too divine" outfits he has in stock, outdoing himself with a description of a $12,000 chinchilla coat as "silver gray, rippling like a river in the midst of early morn -- and so virginal!" (Like I say, it's Pre-Code.) Nancy Carroll gives an excellent performance as Madeleine, at once both comic and poignant, reaching an especially impressive dramatic peak during a hospital sequence. It's a memorable turn, and makes me wonder why her career slowly fizzled out after brief stardom in the early '30s. Leading man John Boles is handsome but somewhat wooden, and too young to play Vanderkill; it's too bad Warner Baxter or Warren William weren't used instead. The most surprising casting choice is that of Nancy's spurned suitor, an Okie blessed with the unlikely name of Panama Canal Kelly. This role is played by cowboy star Buck Jones with requisite sincerity, but his dialog is full of awkward, pseudo-homespun sayings that would make any genuine Okie wince.

In this early effort Sturges explores the balance of power in man- woman relationships as he would later, with more sophistication and polish, in The Lady Eve, The Palm Beach Story, and Unfaithfully Yours. Fans of those films will want to seek this one out, for although it's not entirely successful this movie is surprisingly enjoyable in its own right, considerably boosted by a sparkling performance by the unjustly neglected Nancy Carroll.

P.S. Since writing this review I've managed to locate a copy of the script for the stage version of Child of Manhattan. The basic plot is the same, and several of the play's scenes are repeated almost verbatim in the movie. In the play we see more of Madeleine's family, but most of that material was dropped from the film, and so was a sequence involving an eccentric room-service waiter. It's a funny scene, but it doesn't advance the story. Over all, I'd say this is a case where the screen version is an improvement over the source material. The movie is more tightly focused and satisfying than the stage play.