In order to understand how important typecasting was in classic Hollywood, how it could
make or break a movie — even a cheap B picture with a twelve-day shooting
schedule — look no further than Republic’s 1944 crime programmer Out of the Storm, starring Jimmy Lydon. Lydon
gained fame playing comic strip teenager Henry Aldrich nine times for Paramount
Pictures throughout the war years. After the fighting ended he signed a
contract with Republic Pictures (which he jokingly referred to as Repulsive Pictures!)
and made several low rent crime films, the most notable of which was Edgar Ulmer’s Strange Illusion (1945). From time to
time Lydon appeared in supporting roles in major studio productions, including
a pleasantly funny turn alongside Elizabeth Taylor in the 1947 William Powell hit
Life with Father, and, believe it or
not, as Ingrid Bergman’s little brother in Victor Fleming’s 1948 colossus, Joan of Arc. Lydon enjoyed a lengthy
acting career in Hollywood films and on television before transitioning into a
significant role as a producer. He even did a stretch as vice-president of the
Screen Actors Guild. As of this writing he’s approaching 92 and living happily in
California with his wife of 62 years.
In Out of the Storm, set during the war, he
is perfectly cast as Donald Lewis, a clerk at west coast naval yard. Amidst the
tumult of the never-ending stream of tankers, freighters, and liberty ships
sliding into the Pacific, Donald spends his days in the relative calm of the
payroll office, endorsing checks for the yard’s ten thousand workers. It’s
Christmastime as the movie opens, and Donald has just taken possession of
$125,000 in folding money, when a crew led by Stubbins (familiar hood Marc
Lawrence) hurries up the stairs and into the payroll loft. Stubbins shoots the guard, beats another man
unconscious, and then forces Donald to grab stacks of bills from the safe.
After the gang flees Donald telephones security, but before they arrive he
gapingly realizes that the crooks overlooked the $100,000 intended for the workers’ Christmas
bonuses and made off with significantly less: the $25,000 in fives and tens meant for check
cashing. Donald hesitates for just a moment, and then hides the money. He
returns later, in the dead of night, and smuggles it home. The remainder of the
movie vacillates between the predictable and the surprising as Donald tries
hard to hang onto the loot before eventually coming around — though Out of the Storm pleases even when it
treads this familiar ground.
Let’s
momentarily imagine the challenge faced by Out
of the Storm’s producers, needing to fill the lead. Here we have a fairly
straightforward morality tale about a war worker who steals, albeit passively
(everything about Donald is passive), and most importantly, whose crime becomes
the catalyst for his coming of age. We need an actor who can sell two key
characteristics: the audience must be able to understand his motivation to
steal, and in time they must be able to forgive him. The movie never explicitly
tells us why Donald isn’t in the service, though there are two possibilities:
he could have received a 2-B deferment from service as an employee of the war
industry, or his designation could have been the dreaded 4-F: “registrant is
not acceptable for military service.” The casting of Jimmy Lydon, neither a
tough guy nor a dreamboat, makes it clear exactly which weak-kneed designation the
filmmakers wanted us to assume, and it shows us why the casting process is
vital.
What kind
of a guy would take this money? What kind of guy would end up in the payroll
office in the first place? Donald lacks the physical strength required to man
either a rivet gun or a machine gun. And he’s bitter about it. Here’s a kid
with guilt. The movie’s opening narration, in which he resignedly laments his
situation over stock footage of the smoking wreckage of Pearl Harbor, and then
over images of countless ships under construction during the big buildup of 1942,
is a self-pitying diatribe about how some young men “went to the fighting lines
[and] some went to the assembly lines.” Donald feels left out of both groups,
resenting not just the servicemen overseas, but also the blue-collar workers
who make more money than he does:
“Seemed like everybody in the yard was making money.
Everybody else was really building something, really doing something. But me? I
got stuck in the payroll department with a lot of adding machines and file
records and a salary of $40 a week. How far can you make that go?”
And yet
Donald is still a good boy — he mails a chunk of his meager earnings home
to his mother and struggles by on the rest. We get the impression that all
would be well if only he could strap on a uniform and get in the fight like
everybody else. All of his simmering guilt is cleverly ratcheted up by the
presence of his girlfriend and coworker Ginny (Lois Collier, sort of a poor
man’s Gail Russell). Ginny’s a real doll, and entirely out of Donald’s league.
They’ve been together for nearly a year, after bumping into each other during
lunch. Here's how it needles: it’s a mismatched relationship only made possible by the war, and Donald knows it. He constantly uses his small salary as an excuse not to get married, but we suspect that he really believes he doesn’t deserve such a great girl in the first place. Ginny, for
her part, is strangely desperate to get hitched, Donald’s finances be damned.
(It’s terribly easy to imagine a dead Marine on Guadalcanal with her picture in
his breast pocket.)
At any
rate, the film excellently establishes Donald’s angst at being left out of the
fighting and his disappointment at not landing an appropriately butch spot in the war effort, and then
being saddled with a devoted girlfriend whom he doesn’t feel he deserves. Such
a character could easily come across as a weasel. We’d hate Donald if we didn’t
think his heart was in the right place, if he didn’t so obviously love his
mother, if he hadn’t fretted and called the guards after the theft, and if he wasn’t just a
dumb, jealous, understandably immature kid. But we do like him, and we also feel sorry for him.
We understand, just as he does, that Captain America is just a comic strip
character and that there wasn’t a place on the front lines for every weak-kneed
kid who wanted to get in. Perhaps the movie’s best, most transformative moment
comes near then end, when Ginny looks Donald in the eye and calls him a coward,
and the sting of the remark compels him to finally understand something that
all of us ultimately have to come to grips with: that life ain’t fair, and that
not getting all the things we want isn’t an excuse to act out.
Out of the Storm presented a complex casting
problem that, in this instance, the filmmakers solved perfectly. Jimmy Lydon is
nearly flawless as one of the countless fellows left to grapple with self-worth
while fighting the war from home. He successfully spins the confused,
frustrated angst of youth into the moral ambiguity and misguided choices that
lie deep within the tangled heart of film noir.
Out of the Storm (1948)
Directed
by R.G. Springsteen
Screenplay
by John K. Butler
Story by
Gordon Rigby
Starring
Jimmy Lydon, Lois Collier, and Marc Lawrence
Cinematography
by John MacBurnie
Released
by Republic Pictures
Running
Time: 61 minutes
