by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Times
Square Playboy, a 1936 Warners “B”
directed by William McGann from a script by Roy Chanslor — both strictly “B”
talents — though the basis for the story was a 1926 play called The Home
Towners by George M. Cohan, a legendary
actor, singer, dancer and writer and very much on the “A” list. It starred
Warren William and June Travis, though it was obviously a cheapie Warners threw
together just to use up their final commitments to William, who had already
served notice he was leaving when his contract expired and going out to
freelance. (In 1937 he landed the part as the villainous husband in Madame X at MGM but his subsequent career was
disappointing, distinguished only by his droll appearances in the Lone Wolf
series films at Columbia and his off-casting as a murderer in Edgar G. Ulmer’s
PRC melodrama Out of the Night, a.k.a. Strange Illusion, in 1945 — that was actually a modern-dress reboot of the plot of Hamlet, with Jimmy Lydon as the Hamlet character and
William surprisingly effective as the Claudius equivalent.) Anyway, Times Square Playboy turns out to be one of the most misnamed film ever
made, since whatever his romantic past had been, Vic Arnold (Warren William) is
engaged from the start of the film to marry a woman half his age, Beth Calhoun
(June Travis), who works in a nightclub as a singer under the name “Fay Melody”
and whom he met when he hired her brother Wally (Dick Purcell) to work at his
brokerage firm. He’s also bankrolling Beth’s and Wally’s father Mort (Granville
Bates) in his bottle-washing invention and has bought a home for Mort and his
wife Nellie (Dorothy Vaughan). The plot kicks off when Vic invites P. H.
Bancroft (Gene Lockhart), his old boyhood friend from Big Bend, Texas, to come
to New York to be the best man at his wedding — and P. H., who’s generally
addressed as “Ben” but whom Vic years before also nicknamed “Pighead,” jumps to
all the wrong conclusions and decides that Beth is a gold-digger out to marry a
rich man twice her age in order to exploit him for the sake of herself and her
no-good family while she tricks around with her former boyfriend, professional
football player Joe Roberts (Craig Reynolds).
This is one of the few movies
from the 1930’s that even acknowledges the existence of professional football, and we’re later told in
the script that Joe is independently wealthy and actually has more money than
Vic — though the “roo” moustache Craig Reynolds wears throughout the film
(including the brief snippets with titles under them announcing both the
actors’ names and the roles they play — common in 1930’s movies, especially at Warners — a welcome form of credits I’m sorry
isn’t used anymore) was enough to fool us as well as Ben that he was up to no good. Also in the dramatis
personae are Gene Lockhart’s
real-life wife Kathleen as his long-suffering wife in the story, and Vic’s
butler Casey (Barton MacLane, refreshingly speaking instead of shouting most of his lines and actually
showing off a bit of a sense of humor) who’s also what would now be called his
personal trainer, since a large part of his duties seems to consist of
partnering Vic on his workouts. Anyway, Ben tells off the Calhouns and they
want nothing to do with Vic — Beth breaks up with him and Wally threatens to
quit his company — and there’s a lot of fooforaw until Beth sends back the
$40,000 necklace Vic gave her, the case turns out to be empty and the Calhouns
descend on Vic’s penthouse apartment en masse — whereupon Ben, anxious to get the Calhouns
together under Vic’s roof to get them back on speaking terms, reveals that he
palmed the bracelet (had he seen the 1931 film of The Maltese Falcon?), Vic and the Calhoun family reunite and all ends
well with the marriage still on schedule.
The Home Towners was first filmed by Warner Bros. in 1928 as one of their early talkies
(it’s unclear whether it was a full-talkie or a part-talkie because it’s lost —
apparently not even the soundtrack records survive for this one) and it’s clear
that though Warren William is nominally the male lead, Gene Lockhart is
playing the central character (I’m assuming his is the role Cohan himself played in the stage
production in 1926); he has more screen time than anyone else in the film and
it’s clear the focus is on him and his character arc, not William’s. As Charles pointed out, it’s a
one-joke movie and the one joke is not particularly funny — three years after
William’s key role in Gold Diggers of 1933, a movie with some strong plot similarities to this one (and also a
remake of one Warners had made just a few years before when the talkies were
new!) but one with genuine irony and wit (his part in Gold Diggers of 1933 has similarities to both male leads here, in that he falls in love with a
showgirl himself but still remains committed to seeing that his brother, played
by Dick Powell, doesn’t marry one) — but then again both William and Warners
were going through the motions on this one (they’d already rewritten the ending
of his 1935 film Living on Velvet so that its heroine, Kay Francis, ended up with George Brent rather
than William at the end, just to get back at him for his announced intention of
leaving the studio once his contract was finished!), with Warners giving him a
“B” remake to run out his contract and William essentially “phoning in” his
performance. Though the focus of this one is on the men, it’s the women who
turn in the best performance: June Travis is attractive, perky and has a nice
voice (I’m assuming it’s hers and not a voice double) and Kathleen Lockhart
does a nice long-suffering voice-of-reason part in the ZaSu Pitts manner.
Still, Times Square Playboy is a 62-minute movie that even at that length tends to overstay its
welcome.
