by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I wound up watching a “B” movie from RKO in 1933
I’d recorded off Turner Classic Movies when I could still record TV shows
before Cox’s accursed “all-digital” conversion made that impossible: Lucky
Devils, a quirky story that begins with a
brilliant and surprisingly violent sequence that’s oddly brutal for a 1933
movie, even one made during the relatively loose “pre-Code” era. It’s a bank
robbery, but one in which both the robbers themselves and the people in the
bank they’re robbing — especially the bank’s security people — seem to be more
interested in inflicting the maximum death toll on each other than the
priorities that usually apply in a situation like this. (Usually bank robbers
want to do as little mayhem as possible — their objective is loot, not carnage
— and bank employees are told to stay calm, go along with the robbers, wait
until they’ve got away and it’s safe, and then call the police.) In the middle
of a lot of spectacular action, we get a pull-back and find that this is taking
place on a movie set and what we’ve seen is a bank-robbery sequence being shot for a film. Then we’re introduced to our
principals, stunt people Skipper Clark (William Boyd — the one who later played
Hopalong Cassidy, not the William
“Stage” Boyd whose scandalous antics got the other William Boyd fired by RKO under the morals clause in
his contract, seemingly ruining his career until Paramount signed him to do the
Hoppy movies and Boyd insisted on the TV rights to them, which made him a
fortune when they were reissued to TV in the early 1950’s) and Bob Hughes
(William Gargan). After work ends for the day Skipper and Bob hang out at a bar
that seems to cater mostly to stunt people (“A stunt person’s bar?” Charles
asked incredulously), though one of the other patrons is Fran Whitley (Dorothy
Wilson), who’s run out of money after an attempt to crack Hollywood as an
aspiring actress and is about to commit suicide when Skipper and Bob realize
what’s happening and rescue her. (A sign reading “HOLLYWOOD” is blinking in the
background as she prepares to jump off the building’s balcony into the
Hollywood canyon below, and both I and an imdb.com contributor thought the
scene might have been inspired by the then-recent suicide of minor actress Peg
Entwistle, who’d killed herself by jumping off the Hollywood sign following a
similarly failed attempt to make it as an actress — though she did get at least
one credit in RKO’s abysmal Thirteen Women, a movie so bad a lot of jokesters in Hollywood said that anybody who’d been in it would have been so embarrassed it
wasn’t surprising at all that one would kill herself.) They let her stay with
them, and of course there’s a romantic-triangle rivalry in which Fran thinks
Skipper is taking her out just to warn her away from Bob, but in fact Skipper
wants her for himself. This leads him to break one of the cardinal rules of
stunt person-dom: don’t get married, because if you do you’ll have another
person (or two or more, quite likely, especially given the penchant of women in
movies to get pregnant the very first time they have sex) in your life to care
about and you’ll lose your edge, get worried, get careless and die.
We’ve
actually seen this happen to Slugger Jones (William Bakewell, playing a minor
role just two years after he was billed ahead of Clark Gable in the 1931 MGM
film Dance, Fools, Dance with
Joan Crawford) — yes, this is one of those bizarre movies in which the writers
(Casey Robinson and real-life stunt person Bob Rose, “original” story; Agnes
Christine Johnson and Ben Markson, screenplay) give the male characters silly
nicknames like Skipper, Slugger and Happy to indicate how butch they are — in
the bar scene, in which Slugger introduces his pals to the woman he’s about to
marry, Doris (Julie Haydon), and we just know that as soon as they get married Slugger is going to
screw up a stunt and it’s going to kill him and leave her an instant widow — a pregnant instant widow, this being a movie (and one produced,
ironically, by David O. Selznick, who later in a memo during the preparation of
Gone with the Wind lampooned
“these infallible pregnancies at single contacts”). The stunt is a scene in a
gangster movie in which he’s supposed to be driving a car in a chase scene and
sideswipe a lamp-post; instead, on the first take he misses the lamp-post
altogether and the second one he crashes the car into the lamp-post, sending it through a plate-glass
window in a storefront set and killing himself. (In 1933 a “glass” window on an
outdoor set, especially if it were supposed to break as part of the action, was
usually made of spun sugar precisely so anyone crashing through it wouldn’t get hurt by shards of glass.) This example doesn’t
stop Skipper and Fran from tying the knot, though the film dramatizes another
stunt people’s superstition — if one of the stunt people breaks a bottle the
night before, it means someone will get killed on the set the next day. Skipper
and Fran accidentally break a bottle the night before their friend Happy (Bruce
Cabot) is supposed to do a difficult stunt — he’s playing a firefighter who’s
supposed to swing over to the building on the other side of the backlot
“street” and rescue a police officer (played by Bob) from the building before
it collapses (and there’s a marvelous shot from director Ralph Ince showing
that the “buildings” are just false fronts — it’s well-known now that movie sets are built that way but not many
moviegoers realized that in 1933).
Once again, as with the earlier scene, it
appears that a lot of the dodges real-life moviemakers used in 1933 to minimize
the potential damage to life and limb from doing a scene like this aren’t being
used in the film-within-a-film, “Right Living” by director Hacket (Alan
Roscoe), depicted as an unfeeling bastard who doesn’t care how many lives he
has to sacrifice to get the big action scenes he wants). Hacket has his effects
people actually set fire to the building that’s supposed to burn (wouldn’t it
have been safer to do it with a model and patch it in with a process screen?
Maybe not, given how awful the process work is throughout this movie; though
ace cinematographer Vernon Walker is credited with the special effects — and that, not “trick shots,” is the actual term used on his
credit — the process shots look incredibly phony and it’s hard to believe this
movie was being shot on the same lot at the same time as the magnificent and
still convincing effects film King Kong) and Happy’s gloves stick on the rope he’s supposed to be swinging
from and he dies. Hacket insists on shooting the scene again the next day and
hires Skipper to take Happy’s place — only Fran, who wants her husband to get
out of stunt work because it’s too risky, picks exactly the wrong time to make
her point. She crashes the set just when Skipper is about to do the stunt, and
her presence jars off his timing and he does the swing too late to catch Bob,
who takes a plunge into the fire. Fortunately Bob survives with only minor
injuries, but Skipper is now considered unemployable as a stunt person and, in
a grim montage sequence that looks more like something from a Warner Bros. film
than anything we expect from RKO (though if Warners had been making this, James Cagney would have been
playing Skipper and Pat O’Brien would have been playing Bob!), he’s unable to
find any other sort of work either. Eventually he lands a job on the labor gang
(i.e., the carpenters who build sets) for another Hacket picture, this one set
against a waterfall and featuring a climactic stunt sequence involving a person
taking a boat over the waterfall and hopefully surviving. Hacket offers $100 to
whoever will do this stunt, his assistant director ups the ante to $200, but
there are no takers … until Skipper receives a telegram from Dr. Leith, the $25
medical man he hired to take care of his pregnant wife Fran and deliver her
baby (is it that big a surprise that he knocked her up as soon as he had sex with her?), that
complications have set in and he needs $200 to put Fran in a hospital.
If
you’ve seen more than about six movies in your life you’ll know what happens
next: Skipper talks Hacket into letting him do the supposedly lethal stunt,
survives it, then he and Bob get into Skipper’s car and race down the mountain
from the location to the city so they can get the money to Fran’s doctor so she
can have her baby in a hospital. Only they (or the real stunt people who were doubling for William Boyd and
William Gargan playing stunt
people!) crash the car halfway down the mountain and Gargan tricks one of the
motorcycle cops who were chasing them and that allows Boyd to steal the cop’s
motorcycle (the nameplate “Harley-Davidson” is clearly visible on its gas tank,
by the way) and use it to ride
the rest of the way into town. Lucky Devils is a good movie on its own terms — Ince stages the
action well and the characterizations are breezily entertaining in a way you
didn’t often get in similar RKO attempts to poach on Warners’ territory — and
the only defect in it is how relentlessly predictable it is. Throughout the
film you seem to be about a reel or two ahead of the writers (for Robinson and
Rose to take credit for an “original” story seems even more of a perversion of
language than usual!), and every time you think, “I know where this is going,” it duly goes there. No wonder
Robinson later on got so persnickety about not taking credit for any scripts
except the ones he wrote entirely by himself — even though that cost him a
share of the Academy Award for Casablanca, for which he wrote the love scenes between Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid
Bergman but didn’t qualify to share the award because he’d declined credit.
