Angels Over Broadway

1940's "Angels Over Broadway" is actually a little play on words, since the name of one of the main characters is Engle, which in German means Angel (actually spelled Engel).

Written by Ben Hecht, the film stars Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Rita Hayworth, Thomas Mitchell and John Qualen. It's an interesting and sweet film with very good performances, but you would swear it's based on a play because it is extremely heavy on dialogue.

The story concerns four people who wind up joining forces: a wheeler dealer named Bill O'Brien (Fairbanks Jr.), a suicidal man, Engle (Qualen), a lonely performer, Nina (Hayworth) and a drunken playwright, Eugene Gibbons (Mitchell).

Engle needs to come up with $3,000 by morning that he embezzled; O'Brien thinks Engle is a rich sucker; Nina is looking to meet someone successful; and Gibbons has written another flop. They all are in the same nightclub.

While intoxicated, Gibbons learns Engle's sad story and is determined to help him. His first move - taking back a piece of $12,000 jewelry from his girlfriend -- does not work as, after he takes it, she tells him it's paste.

O'Brien had planned to bring Gibbons to a poker game so he could lose a lot of money to thugs and O'Brien could earn a bonus. However, it is decided that Engle should go instead and skip out after winning the initial money that the players will allow him to win to draw him into a false sense of luck.

Nina goes along, interested in O'Brien, even after she finds out he's broke.

One of the most amusing aspects of the film is that everyone - including the mobsters - knows who the Gibbons character is. They all say,"Oh, yeah, you're the playwright."

Anyone who has ever watched "Jeopardy" knows that today, no one knows current playwrights by name or face, let alone current plays.

The film is interesting as well because is that although this is really four individual stories, the plots converge so that the film is not in the least episodic.

Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. Is marvelous as usual. The man could be the most elegant of British gentlemen or a born and bred New York low-life. Here he is the latter and a delight.

I am so glad a previous comment mentioned Marilyn Monroe - she must have been influenced by Hayworth in this film, as Hayworth's voice and delivery in spots can only be described as pre-Marilyn. Monroe couldn't have had a better role model. Hayworth is just beautiful and gives a sympathetic portrayal of Nina.

Mitchell's performance is heartrending, especially when he calls his wife on the telephone. Qualen has precious little dialogue but he, too, does a great job as a desperate man.

Definitely recommended for the acting and the structure of the film, which is masterful.

This had a very interesting beginning, really getting my attention, but then bogged down way too much, mainly with Thomas Mitchell's inebriated rantings. (Anyone ever notice how many drunks and loud-and-obnoxious characters Mitchell played?)

The writers also gave Rita Hayworth some sappy dialog as she tried to be Douglas Fairbanks' girl. But, I wasn't complaining looking at the young, innocent-and-gorgeous looking Hayworth. Wow - hubba, hubba!

The story, however, does pick up with the card game and then finishes strong. John Qualen is good as the mousy man who really is at the center of this story. He may not be the 'name' actor the others are here, but he is the real star of this movie.

I first became friends with Rita when I was 22 and the same age as she is in this only film of hers I had never seen till last night. On that night she and Hermes Pan (master choreographer)were slumming to show her what a coffee house was like, and my roommate who knew Hermes invited them to the hippie like house in an alley way in West Hollywood we shared.We both were in love with the Goddess and did black magic (amateur)to see that Hermes would bring her and it worked.Rita was 38 an still beautiful,a gypsy who drank our cheap wine,and we talked and laughed till dawn. From that day forward,we spent three or four nights a week at her home on Hartford and she often burnt dinner for us and we drank Dom Perignon and we danced and laughed and she told stories and her Brooklyn accent would come out (I hear it a lot in ANGELS) Rita always insisted she could act and this film showed her talent and some of her incredible allure which was emerging.I think she did BLOOD AND SAND the next year where she was outrageously sensual and cruel.She was great in that.Paulene Kael disliked her because she was dubbed by Anita Ellis in most films even though Rita had a decent voice. I found this Hecht film to be far ahead of its time with terrific casting and dialogue which sounded like Mankiewicz in a way,and a touch of Damon Runyon with sophistication.It is an odd, and terrific film and my Rita was really good and I watched her and she "listened" to other actors like a seasoned performer.She still is magical and her presence on film still excites.

For the most part this unusual, thought-provoking and character-driven moral fable is a fascinating affair but, in spite of the compact running-time, it becomes tiresomely talkative (especially given Hecht's overwritten script). Co-directed by a writer (Hecht made seven films in this multiple capacity, but this is the first one I've watched!) and a cinematographer that were second to none in their respective professions, it's small wonder that the film is brimming with sparkling dialogue (particularly as delivered by Thomas Mitchell, here in his trademark role of philosophical drunk) and inventive shadowy lighting.

The main roles, however, are equally well-filled: Mitchell, as I said, wasn't really stretching himself here but his three co-stars - Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Rita Hayworth and John Qualen - had rarely been offered such an opportunity to shine up to this point. Fairbanks' best-known role had been his 'smiling villain' Rupert of Hentzau in THE PRISONER OF ZENDA (1937; where's that DVD, Warners?) but he had already made other impressive ensemble pieces, such as THE YOUNG IN HEART (1938; see my review elsewhere) and GUNGA DIN (1939); actually, his role here is sort of similar to that of the former - though he's a harder character, an utter heel, but whose scheme of 'taking' a man he believes to be a millionaire rebounds on himself and actually ends up involved in the 'taking' of his 'business partners' to the benefit of the latter (who's really an embezzler on the brink of suicide)! The unwilling crook is played by John Qualen, the great - if largely unsung - diminutive and mild-mannered character actor, whose other notable roles included the murderer in HIS GIRL Friday (1940), a victim of the Oklahoma Dustbowl in THE GRAPES OF WRATH (1940) and "Miser" Stevens in THE DEVIL AND DANIEL WEBSTER (1941). The film's feminine interest, then, is provided by a young Rita Hayworth who, again, exceeds all expectations with her role of a star-struck girl who forsakes her dreams of glory in order to do a good deed (even if she's initially drawn into the 'plot' purely on a whim by Fairbanks); indeed, the characters' individual reformation - more so than in THE YOUNG IN HEART, and done in a much less sentimental manner - adds an undercurrent of spirituality to the film's prominent sophistication and hard-boiled veneer, which is not so surprising coming from Hecht!

For its time, ANGELS OVER Broadway must have seemed like a B-movie with pretensions; while it falters here and there under the strain of its own self-indulgence, because it is unique, the film doesn't feel all that dated today and is bound to give detailed pleasure on every viewing.

It is so easy to write off beauty as the reason an actress achieves great rank in Hollywood, and it is what also plagued Marilyn Monroe - the desperate need to be taken seriously for your talent rather than your looks once you have become famous for beauty alone.

I myself had never given Rita Hayworth props for anything other than her luminous visual persona. So it was with great delight that I came across this exceptional film, with its screwball comedy timing and humor, and its amazing ensemble casting - from a sleazy but compelling performance by Douglas Fairbanks Jr. To the ironic portrayal of the has-been drunk played to iconic perfection by Thomas Mitchell.

But the two real gems are John Qualen as a suicidal bookkeeper who is the target of a 2 bit mob scam, and Rita Hayworth - in a portrayal as exceptional to me as Rosalind Russell in The Front Page, or Marilyn Monroe in 7 Year Itch - plays a star-struck wanna-be who is barely making it in shady circumstances, yet manages to convey tremendous innocence and idealism in spite of her deeply compromised situation.

The most striking thing to me of all is how uncanny it is to watch what one would consider to be a classic Monroe performance coming from an actress seven years prior to Marilyn having been given her first on screen part. Suddenly I felt like I understood how Marilyn had crafted her persona - hours of sitting in darkened theaters watching Rita Hayworth concoct her brilliant magic of innocence and seduction like it was real and not a carefully crafted act.

In my humble opinion, I don't believe Marilyn would have been nearly as iconic had she not had Rita Hayworth's example to follow, and this portrayal in Angels Over Broadway is the link that, to me, irrefutably proves my point! What an amazing, under-appreciated work of group talent and screen writing art! Rita is poignantly brilliant and her performance ranks for me with Robert Williams in Platinum Blonde for great, naturalistic acting that lasts through time.