by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After our recent viewing of St. Louis Woman with Jeanette Loff and Johnny Mack Brown (a
better-than-average indie from 1934 with solid direction by Albert Ray) I
thought it would be interesting to watch the movie that cost Johnny Mack Brown
his major-studio career. He was a former football player who was signed by MGM
late in the silent era and got to make silent films opposite the big female
stars on the MGM lot: Greta Garbo, Norma Shearer and Joan Crawford. In 1931 MGM
production chief Irving Thalberg green-lighted director Harry Beaumont (whose
1929 musical The Broadway Melody
had won the first Best Picture Academy Award given to a sound film) to make a
film based on a recent (1930) play by Kenyon Nicholson called Torch
Song. This was about a small-time cabaret
entertainer in Cincinnati who falls for a traveling salesman, only he dumps her
for a rich woman and she’s about to commit suicide by jumping off a bridge when
she’s rescued by a Salvation Army missionary. Thalberg cast Joan Crawford as
the cabaret singer, Ivy “Bunny” Stevens; Neil Hamilton as the slimeball
salesman, Howard “Howdy” Palmer; and Johnny Mack Brown as Carl Loomis, the
Salvationist who Takes Her Away From All That — only when Beaumont turned in
his first cut, Thalberg decided that Mack Brown’s performance was too weak and
ordered all his scenes reshot with another actor. The new actor was Clark
Gable, whom MGM had signed without a clear idea of what to do with him — in his
early days at MGM he alternated between playing the voice of traditional
morality (as he’d done as Constance Bennett’s brother-in-law in his first MGM
film, The Easiest Way) and
playing a bad-ass gangster (as he did in his first film with Crawford, Dance,
Fools, Dance, and in the sensationally
successful A Free Soul with Norma
Shearer and Lionel Barrymore)
It was when Gable managed to fuse the good and
bad sides of his characterizations and started to play lovable rogues on screen that his career “broke” and he
became a superstar. (It also helped when he grew the famous moustache, which
oddly brought more character and definition to his face; this early he’s
clean-shaven and it’s Hamilton who’s sporting a neatly trimmed moustache that
establishes him as a slimeball roué
who uses women.) Frankly, Johnny Mack Brown would probably have been more
believable as a Salvationist — given the way they were usually cast, one would
expect to see Gable as the seducing salesman and Hamilton as the Salvationist —
but Gable’s presence on screen is so electrifying that even in a miscast role
he makes his authority felt and makes the predictable ending (Ivy strays back
into Howdy’s arms when the two end up in the same hotel, she’s ready to throw
all the traces over and embrace the wild side, only Gable comes in and, in the
same stern tones he’d use to boss Vivien Leigh around eight years later in Gone
With the Wind, he orders her back to the
straight and narrow, and by sheer force of will he gets her to comply)
believable. Laughing Sinners
isn’t much of a film plot-wise but it’s saved by the sheer conviction with
which it’s done, the skill of Beaumont and the writers (Bess Meredyth, Edith
Fitzgerald and an uncredited Martin Flavin) in depicting the various moods of
the story, and the ability of the actors to use what the director and writers have
given them to create characters we can believe in and care about. It’s also
nice to see Joan Crawford this early in her career, and while there are scenes
in which she’s visibly thinking out her performance instead of really becoming the character, she’s able to make us feel for the
emotional dilemmas that have left her caught between these two different men
and the two very different lives they’re offering her.
It’s also one of MGM’s
most successful forays into the proletarian territory usually staked out by
Warner Bros.; the nightclub where Ivy performs looks like a nightclub and not
an airplane hangar done up in art deco, the atmosphere of the hotel room where Howdy and his equally slimy
friends Mike (Cliff “Ukulele Ike” Edwards) and Cass (Guy Kibbee, repeating a
role he’d played in the Broadway stage production of Torch Song) attempt to have their way with Ivy and their other
pickups is properly sleazy (and though Kibbee is a letch in this one he’s
considerably lower on the socioeconomic scale than he usually played at Warners
and he’s much less of a comic foof — both he and Crawford manage to make us
believe the rather preposterous plot turn that she’s been so filled with
self-hatred after Howdy re-deflowers her that she’s willing to throw herself at
him because all those
woman-hating men around her have convinced her she deserves nothing better),
and both the bad and the good worlds are refreshingly free of the gloss that
afflicted later MGM productions. The spaces the characters inhabit look like those the script tells us they could afford,
and director Beaumont and cinematographer Charles Rosher manage to make the
scenes between Crawford and Gable look lighter than the ones between Crawford
and Hamilton without resorting to sparkledust effects on the former or chiaroscuro shadows to represent the demi-monde. Indeed, the scenes in which Gable and Crawford are
working a children’s picnic the Salvation Army is throwing glow with innocence
without getting as glucose-sweet as such scenes usually are (it probably helps
that this film was made three years before the emergence of Shirley Temple and
her redefining, seemingly forever, the depiction of children in movies into her
gooey-sweet mold) — and the kids at the picnic are, astonishingly, racially
integrated: Black and white kids are playing together and being served food
together and nobody is making a big deal about it either way.
Laughing
Sinners is one of those studio-era triumphs
of style over substance — and it’s a curious coincidence that Marjorie Rambeau
is in the cast playing an aging, over-the-hill entertainer at the cabaret where
Crawford works, and 22 years later she would play Crawford’s mother in an MGM
film that used the original title of this one, Torch Song. From the opening scene in which Crawford greets Neil
Hamilton’s train in a driving rainstorm to the closing, in which she and Gable
walk arm-in-arm, their backs to the camera, in a sylvan nature glade on a sunny
day, Laughing Sinners is a
testament to the cool professionalism of the studio system in general and its
underrated director, Harry Beaumont (who according to film historian Richard
Barrios had far more “clout” at MGM than a lot of directors who are much more
highly regarded today), in particular.
