Authors: Bernard F. Dick
Although Kibbee’s waitress-daughter (Loretta) knows about Cagney’s temper, she still marries him. When he is physically abusive, she stands by her man.
Taxi!
, which began on a note of authenticity, degenerates into jaw-dropping disbelief when the mistress of the man responsible for the “accident” that ruined Loretta’s father begs her for $100, so she and her lover can leave the country! That she would even make such a request is either unalloyed arrogance or a plot device to suggest that the daughter is a pushover. Initially taken aback, Loretta consents. It’s as if she has encountered her mirror image: another woman who, faced with the “love him or leave him” dilemma, chooses the former, as she did herself. The lovers never manage to leave the country. The police arrive, the villain plunges to his death from an open window, and the scales of justice are temporarily balanced, although there is no indication that Cagney has learned to curb his temper—and audiences preferred it that way.
We tend to remember
Taxi!
not for the scenes in which Cagney loses his cool (his behavior is just irksome), but for two others: one in which Cagney s converses with a Yiddish-speaking man in Yiddish; and another, in which the winners of a dance contest are not Cagney and Loretta, who dance like professionals, but the unbilled George Raft and his partner. Both actors were experienced dancers—Raft, sleek and reptilian; Cagney, scrappy and streetwise. But Loretta’s performance should not be overlooked. When she had to play a woman of the working class, without a fancy wardrobe and elaborate makeup, she looked and sounded
blue collar. The script required her to resolve all the tensions within her character, which was not easy, especially the scene with the mistress. Loretta’s sacrificial gesture would have struck audiences as implausible, perhaps even eliciting groans without the right blend of innocence and compassion. That Loretta could combine these emotions in the right proportions is a tribute to her art, which would have been more evident if she had been given better roles. But such was the studio system—particularly Warner’s with its assembly line approach to production.
Taxi!
and
The Hatchet Man
(1932) were not Loretta’s only films with James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson. By the time Warner Bros. had the actors working both sides of the law, Loretta was no longer at the studio.
The Hatchet Man
was not vintage Robinson or Loretta. William Wellman, the director, does not mention it in his autobiography,
A Short Time for Insanity;
Robinson dismisses it in his,
All My Yesterdays;
and Loretta never seems to have expressed an opinion.
The Hatchet Man
may have some historical significance. The David Belasco and Abdullah Amet play that inspired it was a re-creation of the Tong Wars that erupted in various Chinatowns—especially those in San Francisco and Los Angeles—and lasted from the mid 1800s to the 1920s. The tongs were originally secret societies, more like protective agencies than clans, created to protect Chinese immigrants from discrimination and violence. Gradually, they turned into mafia-like organizations with a similar hierarchies and codes of honor. When a tong member was murdered, a hatchet man—the hereditary title for an avenger—would dispatch the victim with a hatchet.
Robinson played the title character. Although he was a graduate of the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, he was not perceived as a “serious” actor and, in fact, was never nominated for an Oscar. Yet in
The Hatchet Man
, he was authentically Chinese in speech and manner. He is assigned to kill a boyhood friend (J. Carrol Naish), who accepts his fate resignedly. (Nash moved and spoke with ritualized staginess, which may have been his or Wellman’s idea of the way ethnic Chinese act when faced with death.) But first, Naish has Robinson swear that he will marry his daughter when she comes of age. The daughter is Loretta, unrecognizable in her first scene, in which she appears more metallic than human. Her face looks lacquered rather than made up, resembling a mask with slits for her eerily slanted eyes. Her relationship with Robinson’s character is a May-December marriage, which comes apart when Loretta takes a younger lover. The ignominy that her adultery brings on the tong results in Robinson’s expulsion and the loss of his business. Meanwhile, the lover turns drug dealer and pimp, whisking Loretta off to China,
where she is sold into prostitution. If this turn of the plot seems deliberately sensational, it is historically accurate. The more criminal tongs were drug traffickers and white slavers.
Robinson works his way to China, rescues Loretta, and hurls his hatchet at the wall—the blade landing in the back of the drug-dealing pimp standing behind it. Although
The Hatchet Man
has some historical value in its depiction of the Tong Wars, it is more indicative of Hollywood’s indifference to ethnicity and race in the 1930s. Using white actors, however talented, to impersonate Chinese immigrants or even Chinese-Americans reflects the industry’s reluctance to groom non-whites for roles requiring ethnic and racial authenticity. That would eventually change, but not for the next three decades.
The Hatchet Man
was Loretta’s first, but not her last, ethnic role: On her television series,
The Loretta Young Show
, she portrayed an Asian woman again in “The Pearl” (1956).
Loretta’s situation in the 1930s was commonplace: The female lead either outshines the male, or vice versa. In
Employees’ Entrance
, it was the latter. Warren William was a competent “B” movie star, best known as Warner’s Perry Mason in the 1930s and Columbia’s Lone Wolf in the 1940s. As Kurt Anderson, a tyrannical department store manager, William was indisputably the star of
Employees’ Entrance
(1933). His Anderson is so satanic that his victims are more pitiable than tragic. The homeless Madeleine (Loretta) takes refuge in the furniture section of the store, where she plans to spend the night in the model parlor. When the predatory Anderson discovers her, she flirts, he is aroused, a dinner invitation follows, and Madeleine is expected to show her gratitude by not resisting when Anderson backs her against a door. A slow fade out indicates that Anderson has made another conquest.
Anderson gets Madeleine a job as a model, which gives Loretta the opportunity to appear in a pre-code bridal gown with an exposed back. Madeleine marries another employee (Wallace Ford), whom Anderson is grooming as his assistant. For Anderson, sex has two functions, neither of which has to do with love: It provides a release of tension and a means of control. Like most womanizers, he regards women—even his own employees-as property, advancing them if they are cooperative, passing them off to other executives when he has finished with them, or firing them when they have outlived their usefulness.
With his hawk-like face, pomaded hair, aquiline eyes, and streamlined figure clothed in black, William was the incarnation of Mephistopheles. Had
Employees’ Entrance
been made in 1934, when the production code was being enforced with a vengeance, the resolution would have been
dramatically different. As it is, Anderson gets Madeleine drunk and takes advantage of her again in another elliptical fade out. Now a married woman, Madeleine is so overcome with shame that she attempts suicide. Indifferent to the suffering he has caused, Anderson taunts Madeleine’s husband into shooting him, but not fatally. The ending is truly pre-code: Anderson, who otherwise would have paid for his transgressions by being reduced to standing on breadlines, survives a coup and returns as the manager, more powerful than ever, employing the same tactics that he used earlier to bolster the store’s profits to survive the Great Depression.
Employees’ Entrance
was Warren William’s film. The script did not allow William to humanize Anderson; instead, he drew on the qualities that made his character succeed in a cutthroat business, when two-thirds of the nation could afford to shop at a department store on the order of Macy’s. He regarded the other third as potential employees, provided they could deliver what he wanted.
Loretta fared better in her second film with William Wellman,
Heroes for Sale
(1933). And she would work with him twice more, at MGM (
Midnight Mary
), and finally at Fox (
The Call of the Wild
). Wellman was not the kind of director to discuss his films in detail; he mentions
Heroes for Sale
in his autobiography because it brought him in contact with his future wife, who was working in a Busby Berkeley musical on the next sound stage. Yet
Heroes
was the kind of film that Wellman understood; it was the companion piece to
Wild Boys of the Road
(1933), his take on the Great Depression from the point of view of kids riding the rails and hoping to establish their own utopia.
Heroes
was set in the same period, but within a different context, focusing on the plight of a World War I veteran, Thomas Holmes (Richard Barthelmess), who was never recognized for his heroic capture of a German soldier. Instead, the medal was awarded to a coward, who mustered up enough courage—thanks to a gun—to bring in the prisoner.
Holmes incurs a spinal injury that requires morphine, resulting in addiction and eventual rehab. Once clean, he returns to the workforce and wanders into a friendly luncheonette, where Mary (Aline McMahon) rents him a room on a floor occupied by two other tenants, Hans, a bolshevik inventor, and Ruth, a laundry worker (Loretta). Ruth finds him a job at her laundry, and before long, Holmes has convinced his co-workers to bankroll Hans’s new invention, a wringer washer. The owner of the laundry no sooner endorses the invention than he suffers a fatal heart attack. The business is sold, and the new owners think only in terms of cutting jobs and increasing profits. When Ruth is killed during
a workers’ demonstration, Holmes is accused of being the instigator and sent to prison for five years. His release coincides with the red scare, when real or suspected Communists were being harassed, and in some cases, deported. Forced to join the ranks of the homeless, he meets, of all people (yes, coincidences mount in this film) the coward, who has been reduced to similar straits. As for the resolution—there is none, which is to screenwriter Robert Lord’s credit. Holmes has been thrown into the fiery furnace; the refining fire has burned away the past, leaving him transformed and defiantly homeless. Like the narrator in Samuel Beckett’s
The Unnamable
, Holmes can say, “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.
Playing another proletarian, Loretta looked surprisingly authentic, perhaps because the character survived on low-level jobs requiring no marketable skills—which might have been Loretta’s fate if she had never become an actress. It was roles like Ruth that revealed her empathy with working class women. She may not have been one herself, but she was an indefatigable worker, subjected to Warner’s acrobatic schedule requiring her to bounce from film to film at a pace that even the most energetic teenager would find daunting. Loretta did not need bargain basement clothes and a cosmetic makeover to play Ruth convincingly. Loretta never worked in a laundry, but she understood women who did. She had seen enough of them at her mother’s boarding house and on studio lots where they toiled as extras. She absorbed what she experienced, depositing it in a memory bank from which she drew, consciously or otherwise, for her characters. And when she could not connect with a character, she simply used her imagination.
More than
The Hatchet Man
,
Heroes for Sale
was the kind of film with which Wellman identified. From the opening scene on a World War I battlefield, with shellfire, exploding grenades, and rain pouring down on men scrambling into trenches, Wellman’s roving camera behaves like another combatant, but impartial enough to avoid the usual Hollywood distinction between the allies and the enemy. Holmes ends up in a German hospital, where a compassionate doctor tells him that his condition will often become so painful that he will need morphine. A lesser director might have made the doctor a devious figure, eager to turn an American into an addict. But the doctor prescribes the only drug he knows to alleviate spinal pain.
When Wellman was directing his kind of film, he framed the shots in such a way as to make them dramatically functional. We see the luncheonette for the first time from the outside, with Mary behind the counter. Rather than cut, Wellman pans to the adjacent building where
homeless men congregate. By emphasizing the proximity of the homeless center to the luncheonette, Wellman is not just making a statement about the economic disparity produced by the Great Depression; nor is he trying to avoid another camera set up. The juxtaposition of the two is a form of foreshadowing: Eventually, the homeless will become regular diners, with special privileges.
Heroes for Sale
was Wellman’s and Lord’s film. Wellman understood the subject matter, and Lord, realizing he could not write a pro-communist, or even pro-socialist script, made it easier for Wellman by having the former bolshevik convert to capitalism after his invention makes him a millionaire. But Holmes, who could have shared in the profits, gives the money to Mary, so she can keep the luncheonette open around the clock to feed the unemployed.
Heroes for Sale
sends a mixed message: Capitalism helps the needy, but only if a private citizen (not the state) provides the means. What is the answer? Capitalism? Socialism? Philanthropy? A combination of the three? One critic found
Heroes for Sale
politically confused
, which it may be. But Warner’s, the most pro-Roosevelt of the studios, was really paying homage to the New Deal, exemplified by Tom’s magnanimity The only difference is that Tom is a private citizen with his own new deal, based on the time-honored principle of people helping people. How that help is executed—by programs like the Civilian Conservation Corps or the Works Progress Administration, or by a philanthropic gesture—is immaterial as long as there are results.
Heroes for Sale
implies there will be help as long as there are Tom Holmeses.