Movie Review: Blues in the Night

Blues in the Night (1941)
directed by Anatole Litvak, starring Richard Whorf, Jack Carson, Betty Field, Priscilla Lane

Note: Review requested by W.B. Kelso, of the fabulous blog 3B Theater: Micro-Brewed Reviews

Jigger Pine (Richard Whorf) is a world-class pianist with only one dream in his heart. To start his own jazz band (or "unit" as he calls it). A group of guys that play the same, live the same, and think the same. All of them on a mission to find the music of the streets and give it back to the people. His friend, reluctant lawyer/aspiring clarinetist Nickie (Elia Kazan) believes in his vision and they recruit two of their friends: Pete the bassist (Peter Whitney) and Peppi the drummer (Billy Halop). It isn't long before their enthusiasm wins over more people, too. Scheming trumpeter Leo (Jack Carson) and his sweet, optimistic wife Character (Priscilla Lane). The quintet begin their ragged life on the road, hitching rides on boxcars and playing to whatever audience they can find.

It's a hard but happy life until one faithful day when they run across ex-con Del Davis (Lloyd Nolan). One careless act of generosity on their parts is enough to win the gangster's loyalty and he brings them to his roadhouse, the aptly-named jungle. The former members of Davis' gang, his old partner Sam (Howard Da Silva), his old flame Kay (Betty Field), and Kay's crippled ex-lover Brad (Wallace Ford), are running the joint and none of them are too happy that Davis has decided to adopt this group of stray musicians. It isn't long before Kay, still angling to win back Davis, takes up with Leo. When Leo gets wise, she sinks her hooks into Jigger. Her toxic demands turn Jigger from a confident musician into a hollow-eyed wreck, willing to tear down everything else to make her happy. Even if it means turning his back on the band and the music he loves.

Blues in the Night is a movie that seems specially ordered for a night of insomniac channel-surfing, the kind of movie you watch through bleary, dazzled eyes at 3:00 A.M. and then forget about until the next morning, when you try to summarize it to your friends. All goes normally at first ("There's these guys that want to start a jazz band"). But before long you start to stumble over the details ("So the baby's dead and the pianist goes on some insane acid trip on account of the gangster's ex-girlfriend and he starts hallucinating that he's an organ grinder's monkey, but the band convinces him to come back, but then the ex-girlfriend returns to plot more evil until her crippled sidekick decides to put a stop to her.."). And then you start to think, "Wait, what the hell was I watching?"

But Blues in the Night is more than the sum of its delirious plot points. It's an amazingly appealing genre mash-up, a film that starts out like any other light musical comedy of Hollywood's golden age and spirals into a proto-noir of backstabbing dames, mental breakdowns, and vengeful gangsters. Despite the descent into darkness, though, the movie remains innocent at the core, allowing its group of music-minded misfits to walk through Hell and emerge unscathed. I have a weakness for movies that can skip through multiple genres. Maybe it's because as movies get bigger, they also get safer. Scene after scene of well-made, polished sameness. Did Blues in the Night seem as messy to the theater audiences of 1941 as it does now? Probably. But I doubt those audiences could have predicted how exhilarating watching that kind of mess could be, seventy years later.

I can pinpoint the exact scene where I fell for this movie. We catch up with our band of musicians as they steal a ride on a boxcar. After raising each other's spirits with a round of "Hang on to Your Lids, Kids," our gang welcomes a fellow traveler aboard. Only this traveler is no ordinary bum; he's a hardened criminal, who immediately pulls a gun and demands money. They hand over all they have and the train travels on, into the night. The gangster, Del Davis huddles by himself in the corner while the gang falls asleep, clutching their instruments. When the train pulls into the station, a railway man opens the car and beams the flashlight into the faces of our heroes. Instead of getting mad, he greets them as old friends. "Last time I saw you was three months ago...still riding the boxcars?" He promises not to kick them off, leaving them with a warning not to play so loud. When he's gone, the gang promptly settles back down to sleep but Davis won't let them. 

"You could have turned me in," he snaps. 

"Why should we? We've been broke and hungry, too," says Jigger, the band leader. 

The band members lie back down, curled up together like kittens or a bunch of kids at a sleepover. They are total innocents, completely unafraid or resentful. A smile breaks out over Davis' face and you can see the lost humanity slowly return to his eyes. When this hardened gangster decides to take care of them, it plays out not just as some ridiculous plot twist, but a sweet fantasy. Nobody survives on luck and music alone but sometimes, it's nice to pretend we could.

Director Anatole Litvak doesn't give you any time to question the plot of Blue in the Night. He keeps it moving at a frantic pace; you can almost hear him snapping his fingers in the background of each scene, ordering each actor to pick up the tempo. These jazz musicians talk faster than Wall Street stockbrokers, trading quips and comments and insults at such a rate that one scene can shuffle through six different moods. I like the speed, though. It reminds me of His Girl Friday and Stage Door, other movies about people doing what they love, no matter what it costs them. If you love something so much you couldn't imagine doing anything else, then why wouldn't your brain zip along at the speed of twenty ideas per minute?

While Litvak's direction is smooth and confident throughout, the movie really turns on the heat with the montage sequences (credited to Don Siegel). The first one is a sharp evocation of what life on the road means for a penniless jazz band. We race through images of the band members playing, of maps, and outstretched thumbs and speeding cars. I especially like the way the film uses angles, swiping across the screen with a character's instrument when it cuts into the next scene, as if to show music itself as a physical force, propelling these people onward.

But the second montage is the crowning glory of the film, its most perfect, bizarre moment. Jigger Pine falls off the deep end after the femme fatale Kay leaves him. He can't even remember how to play the songs he wrote. Suddenly, after a disastrous reunion with his friends, Jigger falls unconscious and dives headfirst into a surreal hallucination. He sees his bandmates. Then they turn into the five fingers of a hand. He sees Kay, repeated over and over, until she becomes an entire orchestra, each of them playing a separate instrument. Giant hands wave in his face. He shrinks down into an organ grinder's monkey while his bandmates taunt him. And then, in an image that feels like it should have been storyboarded by Salvador Dali, Jigger finds himself at the piano, ready to play, only for the keys to melt into white goo, trapping his fingers completely. The imagery is so stark and arresting that the movie doesn't even try to follow up on it in any logical way. Jigger just wakes up from this crazy dream and that's it, he's ready to be cured. I'm sort of wondering if Kay herself is supposed to be a metaphor for drug or alcohol addiction, because it really does play out more like Ray Milland coming off the DTs in The Lost Weekend than anything else.

Richard Whorf plays the film's protagonist, Jigger Pine, as a man of almost unreal goodness and conviction. He's always smiling, always supportive. Litvak keeps Whorf as the focus of nearly every group shot, letting the other band members cluster around him like eager acolytes. Because the movie holds Jigger up to such a high standard, I found myself almost rooting for the femme fatale Kay to drag him off his mountaintop. And drag him she does, right into the mental ward. Whorf has a relaxed, friendly presence onscreen and he handles Jigger's descent into desperation without histrionics (except that loopy hallucination scene). The script doesn't give him much chance to add character depth. Jigger's downfall happens as simply and easily as if someone had just flipped a light switch. 

I'm really beginning to wonder what quirk of fate and casting kept landing dimpled, all-American Betty Field in the role of irresistible, untrustworthy female. Every time I see her, she's playing some kind of tramp, from low (Mae in Of Mice and Men) to high (Daisy in The Great Gatsby). Maybe it was that insinuating nasal whine she could put into her voice. Or maybe it was the go-for-broke energy she displays here as conniving Kay. Field's femme fatale is a jangling bunch of nerves and tinsel, a two-bit, no-talent floozy who chews through men like they were strips of gum. I've ripped into Field before on this blog, but she's much improved here, clearly relishing Kay's barbed-wire ambition more than Daisy's aristocratic charms. However, Field relishes it rather too much, playing up Kay's whiny, nagging side so much that it's difficult to understand how she ever manages to enslave men. Personally, I'd be hopping a boxcar just to escape the woman's awful vowel sounds. And when she calls down vengeance upon Jigger and Del and all the men who haven't given her what she wants, Field goes right for the rafters in a way that's madly enjoyable and downright silly. I mean, she doesn't shout, "And then I will build my race of atomic supermen!" but she comes close.

As Field's good-girl foil, Priscilla Lane manages the trick of being the squarest jazz musician ever seen, until Martin Milner stole her spot in Sweet Smell of Success. Okay, so that's rough on Lane. She does have a nice voice and if her sweet, blonde singer seems like she'd be more comfortable baking an apple pie than hitching it on boxcars, well, at least she provides the audience with a pleasant break from Field's nastiness. The script does add a bizarre touch by giving her character the name, "Character." Really? Maybe Ethel Waters could pull that off but Priscilla Lane?

 Blues in the Night benefits from a wealth of wonderful supporting actors. There's Jack Carson, playing a heel as only Jack Carson could. It's a typical Carson role, the guy who knows he's laying traps for suckers but is honestly hurt and confused that these suckers would expect any more or less of him. There's also Elia Kazan, turning in another enjoyable, fast-talking performance after City for Conquest. Seriously, guys, I never would have pegged Kazan as any kind of acting talent, but that's twice now I've found him pretty good. Lloyd Nolan, as the gangster Del Davis, manages to convey the perfect amount of affability and menace. 

But by far and away, my favorite supporting performer was Wallace Ford, who plays Brad, Kay's ex-lover and fumbling sidekick. At first, Brad seems like nothing more than a pathetic crony, a shuffling Igor too stupid to free himself from Kay and Davis. But in one key dialogue with Jigger, Ford slowly reveals the tragedy behind the man. Once he felt sorry for Kay. And then he fell in love with her, breaking his own body in a rodeo just to impress her. "I wasn't much good for anything after that except hanging around her." As Ford talks, you see Brad stand straight and tall for the first time, his voice free of self-pity, revealing a depth of experience that turns him from a cringing crony into a fallen hero.

Blues in the Night is a movie I'd be very happy to stumble across again. It's weird, it's sweet, it's got good Arlen and Mercer tunes, and it's entirely unique. I don't think I'd ever want to own it, though. It really belongs to that realm of happenstance movies. Too mixed-up for respectability, too cute for sophistication, and too enjoyable to resist.

Favorite Quote:

"You see, I'm a student of jazz. I know the anatomy of swing, not only musically but theoretically. I've heard everything from Le Jazz Hot to Downbeat. You'll find out for yourself. As the Latin say, res ipsa loquitur. On the side, I'm a student of the law."

Favorite Scene:

As I mentioned before, that crazy montage scene. Can't say it enough.

Final Six Words:

Exhilarating riff turns into fever dream

Movie Review: City for Conquest

City for Conquest (1940)
directed by Anatole Litvak, starring James Cagney, Ann Sheridan

(Note: This is my entry for the James Cagney Blogathon, hosted by R.D. Finch at The Movie Projector)

All Danny Kenny (James Cagney) really wants from life is to settle down with his childhood sweetheart Peggy (Ann Sheridan) and to see his brother Eddie (Arthur Kennedy) finally complete that symphony he's been writing, a symphony of New York and all its ugliness and beauty. The trio have lived their whole lives scraping by in the slums of the Lower East Side, along with their friend the chronically criminal Googi (Elia Kazan). But while Eddie dreams of music, Peggy dreams of dancing, and Googi dreams of being a big shot, Danny refuses to climb higher. Even if his talent for boxing is more than enough to give him a chance at the limelight. 

But when Peggy is lured away by a sleazy dancer (Anthony Quinn) and Eddie's music scholarship is taken away, Danny decides he has no choice but to fight his own way to success with his fists. Maybe then he can live up to Peggy's ambitions and give Eddie the chance to be heard. With the wise guidance of his manager Scotty (Donald Crisp), Danny does rise high, higher than he ever imagined. But what does it matter, if all he really wants is Peggy?

City for Conquest begins with a twinkly, omnipotent bum narrating the classic saga of New Yorkers that want too much. "This is my breakfast, talking up to the big town...seven million people fighting, biting, clawing away to get one foot on a ladder that'll take 'em to a penthouse." He tells all this to policeman Ward Bond, whose incredulous reaction is the funniest moment in the whole movie. Our self-appointed ringmaster moves on to weave his prophecies over a group of children, predicting that the twirling girl in the center will be a great dancer, that the boy punching a playmate in her defense will have to fight through life with his fists and so on. All through this introduction, my mind kept flashing to an image of Barbara Stanwyck in Ball of Fire, wrapping her Brooklyn drawl around the line, "Brother, that's corn."

I probably had Stanwyck on the brain thanks to a recent back-to-back viewing of Golden Boy and Clash by Night. But the reference has more relation to City for Conquest than you might think since since both films were adaptations of Clifford Odets plays. And City for Conquest feels so much like a movie that very badly wants to be Odets, specifically the Odets of Golden Boy. It wants to celebrate the poetry of the tenements and the scrabbling, hungry masses. It wants to explore their longings in high-flung metaphors. Danny Kenny's boxing becomes a stand-in for material ambition while his brother's desire to distill the essence of the American metropolis into melody is pure Gershwin and treated as a matter of near-celestial magnitude. It's easy to condescend to the pretentious sentimentality that floods City for Conquest (and Golden Boy for that matter) but at the time, this material had deep relevance for audiences fighting through the Depression. This was the struggle of the little guy, living in a world that seeks to bring him down.

The honest performances of James Cagney and Ann Sheridan are what save City for Conquest from sinking into a morass of dated pretension. The story is sentimental but they are not. They play two innocents, desperately in love but always failing to understand each other. Cagney's character Danny is utterly content with his lot in life, making him an unusual role for the actor. The Cagney canon is full of men reaching out to grasp for life with both hands. Here, the grasping is reserved for Ann Sheridan. Her character Peggy is even more naive than Danny but her powerful desire to be a great dancer is the undoing of them both. 

The main problem with City for Conquest is that it wants to tell the story of people trying to conquer the world but centers on a protagonist who has no real ambition in life. How is Danny meant to encapsulate the dreams of the ordinary man when his pure selfless nobility and freedom from doubt make him about as extraordinary as they come? It's James Cagney that lifts Danny Kenny up from a metaphorical street angel into a true human being. As always, he feels too much but can't say it in words. His decision to box for the sake of his brother's musical career is told entirely through a shot of Cagney walking towards the piano, an affectionate smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. In another scene, he listens to Peggy argue with her mother. The mother takes exception to the way the couple sneak around back staircases instead of courting in the parlor and Peggy snaps back that there is no parlor, just a kitchen and a bedroom. The expression that flashes across Cagney's face tells us everything we need to know about Danny's embarrassment over the interruption, his discomfort at the reminder of their shared poverty, and his concern for Peggy.

Cagney's work here lacks the vibrant, unpredictable physicality of his best performances. I suspect that might be due to the direction of Anatole Litvak, who reportedly drove Cagney crazy with his insistence that the actor hit scores of chalk marks in every scene. There's a hint of constraint to his performance here that's suggestive of a man fighting down his own needs and wishes. Not very Cagney-like but wholly appropriate for the character. Cagney relies more on his eyes than his body here. It's an acting choice that becomes bitterly ironic by the movie's end.

City for Conquest was the third teaming of James Cagney and Ann Sheridan. Sheridan had shown scrappy charm in Angels With Dirty Faces and went on to blow everyone away in Torrid Zone, firing off one-liners with superb timing ("You push me one more time and you'll wear this suitcase as a necklace!") so another pairing with Cagney was only natural. They both had an unforced energy and warmth onscreen that always seemed rooted in the behavior of real people. When Sheridan gives Cagney a jab in the ribs or pulls his hat down around his ears, it feels more affectionate than an onscreen kiss. Sheridan's character here is a difficult one to play, a starstruck dancer whose constant flip-flopping over what she wants leads her into decisions that are naive at best and cowardly at their worst. Peggy could have been another monstrous ingenue along the lines of Priscilla Lane in The Roaring Twenties or Joan Leslie in High Sierra. Instead, she's sympathetic and ardent, a woman very clearly torn between love for Danny and the dawning realization that they want very different things from life. Sheridan also manages to subtly convey the effect that Peggy's controlling dance partner has on her, in the way she smiles too quickly and fiddles too much with her hands.

In a way, Peggy might have been the more natural protagonist for City for Conquest since she's the more conflicted and ambitious character. The script however, gives her short shrift. With all the constant references to Danny's boxing name, "Young Samson," Peggy is very obviously meant to be Delilah, another corrupting female that saps the strength of her man and almost destroys him forever. The lesson is driven home further when Lee Patrick shows up late in the film. She's a wisecracking burlesque dancer who reminisces to Peggy about her own lost love and how she wishes she'd chosen the man over the career. Looking at the damage she's caused, Peggy is left with little choice but to agree.

Arthur Kennedy makes his film debut here, as Cagney's ambitious younger brother, the would-be composer. In fact, Kennedy was Cagney's own discovery; he'd spotted him onstage and convinced Warner Brothers to cast him. Kennedy would go on to join that strange class of character actors that included Van Heflin and Richard Widmark. Charismatic enough to be leads and too serious to be comic foils but still relegated to the edges. As he would in later roles, Kennedy brings a watchful intelligence to the part of Eddie Kenny, even if he's given some of the worst lines in the film. When he starts rambling about the music of Allen Street, "with all of its mounting, shrieking jungle-cries for life and sun," there's little to do but take in his reedy good looks and wait for the silent moments. When he looks at Cagney with mingled unease and love, you can see flashes of the actor he'll become.

Anthony Quinn also makes an impression as Murray Burns, the dancer who manipulates and abuses the hapless Peggy. Quinn's slick looks and black heart call to mind all the stereotypes of the time about male dancers, a profession that was often seen as one step away from being a gigolo. But Quinn is no lothario; when he calls Peggy "baby" he snaps it out like the recoil of a gun. He plays it for menace, not seduction. The movie hints many times about just how Murray keeps Peggy in line, including one scene that stops just short of implied rape. 

While Anatole Litvak relies maybe a little too much on montage, there's no denying that his direction of City for Conquest is fluid and fast-paced, his camera gliding down the streets with a grace that echoes his characters and their need for constant movement. James Wong Howe's cinematography manages to convey more of the romance for New York and its denizens than any of the script's little curlicues. And there's a notable scene involving Elia Kazan (surprisingly not so bad as an actor), some thugs, and a tense confrontation in a car that must have suggested something to Kazan for On the Waterfront.

In the end, City for Conquest is a story that, like its characters, reaches too high. The movie's ultimate strength rests not in its stargazing speeches or strained metaphors but in the performances. When the camera just gives in to the struggles that play across the faces of James Cagney and Ann Sheridan, then it becomes something real and moving. When Cagney gently asks Sheridan, "You still my girl?", it would take a pretty hardhearted moviegoer not to want to share in their dreams. If only for a little while.

Favorite Quote:

"Boy was it crowded tonight on the subway. Talk about sardines. They got it easy. At least they're floating in olive oil."

Favorite Scene: 

The final boxing match between Danny Kenny and the opponent that ends up playing the dirtiest of tricks on him. Litvak and Wong Howe turn the scene into a precisely-melded sequence of montage, action shots, and closeups, letting you feel the weight of every blow, letting you see the emotions of every character that cares about Danny and watch their belief turn to horror. The outcome of the match is telegraphed from very early on but it only adds to the suspense. You keep waiting for somebody to realize what's going on but of course, help comes only too late.

Final Six Words:

More flickering candlelight than scorching neon