This movie has an interesting kernel of a story: the rise and fall of a Harlem Numbers banker, between legitimate government crackdowns and the mobs from further south in Manhattan moving in. Indeed, the story is good enough to have been used a couple of times more recently: 1997's HOODLUM and 2007's AMERICAN GANGSTER, both are well made, entertaining movies. This one is not. Let's figure out why.
First, there's the matter of casting. Ralph Cooper, as the man who gets taken in by numbers banker Clarence Brooks, and then pushes him out of the racket and his girl, Cleo Herndon, brings no energy, no intensity to the character in his rise and fall, as Cagney and Robinson had shown in their breakout roles, and as Laurence Fishburne and Denzell Washington would six and seven decades later. He seems amiable and leisurely when he's in a gun battle with the police. Miss Herndon is even more bizarre. She reads each line as if she has not heard what was said before. Brooks seems good, but he vanishes from the picture halfway through.
Of course, these issues are overwhelming, but they argue for a breakdown behind the camera. Arthur Reed's camerawork seem all right, but Harry Fraser was not a director known for putting any snap in his movies, and editor Arthur A. Brooks makes some peculiar choices. Energy levels don't rise and fall in a scene, they begin and end abruptly with changes in the camera set-up; and instead of using camerawork and editing to increase tension as the movie goes on, the opposite effect shows up. The fastest rate of cutting is at the beginning of the movie, and the camera actually begins to move halfway through it. Perhaps Fraser felt this was the only way to get the performances within a scene to match, but it means that as the movie goes on, the energy goes down.
Why these terrible choices? In truth, Fraser was a terrible director, who worked for the real Poverty Row firms. Ralph Cooper as co-director, co-writer, co-producer and star, deserves a lot of the discredit, but clearly he was taking a gamble that didn't pay off.
No, the real problem with this film is lack of money. There was no money for a decent director, no money for a decent script, no money for more time to rehearse and shoot and test and reshoot. This was never going to play in any of the movie palaces. Like other race films of the era, its audiences were the Black houses, where a certain box office could be guaranteed. If it stayed within budget, maybe it would make a few dollars, maybe it would lose a few dollars but establish Cooper as a movie performer, and maybe make some money with the next movie.
There was no next movie. Given the movie I just looked at, it probably lost a lot of money. I won't mourn that, because bad movies don't deserve to make money, although all too often it seems they do and the good ones fail. But it meant an end to cooper's hopes, and it's always sad to see someone fail.
