Video Reviews

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LADY KILLER

SKYSCRAPER SOULS

EMPLOYEES’ ENTRANCE

James Cagney is in classic form in 1933’s Lady Killer, fresh from his successes with such tough-guy roles as Tom Powers in 1931’s The Public Enemy and as Danny Kean, an ex-con turned photographer, in Picture Snatcher. Here Cagney plays Dan Quigley, a wisecracking movie usher whose insolent attitude costs him his job. Quigley soon falls in with a gang of card grifters, which suits his gambling habit perfectly. The gang moves on to a robbery and trouble with the police; by a weird and improbable twist of fate, Quigley is signed on as an extra for a movie studio and soon moves up the career ladder to become a matinee idol! His former partners in crime, however, see Quigley’s success on the silver screen and decide they want to blackmail their way to a piece of the action. Cagney has a great time with the role, gleefully poking fun at his own onscreen image and at Hollywood in general (there’s more than one bombastic German director to be found). His comedic timing shows he is a versatile and enthusiastic actor; a mere couple of years later he would play Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. A sharp-eyed viewer will note the scene in which Mae Clarke reads over a travel brochure about California and its citrus industry. At the word “grapefruit,” she pauses and looks at Quigley, recalling Public Enemy‘s famous scene in which Cagney mushes half a grapefruit in Clarke’s face at breakfast! Cagney’s treatment of women doesn’t improve much for Lady Killer; in one scene he drags an unwilling Margaret Lindsay out of his apartment by her hair and ejects her out the door with a swift kick in the butt, followed soon by her suitcase. This attitude aside, when will you ever have a chance to see Jimmy Cagney as an Indian chief or an 18th-century Italian fop? Lady Killer also manages to throw in a car chase and running gun battle before the end of its 75-minute running time (not to mention two dozen Rhesus monkeys crashing a society party). In the Thirties, Warner Bros. made the best of such tough, entertaining melodramas and comedies, movies that were economical in terms of running time, budgets, shooting schedules, and narratives. Lady Killer is a fast-moving, tongue-in-cheek cross between crime melodrama and farce that must have been great escapist fare for Depression-era audiences.

Though many think of escapism in regard to Thirties films (i.e. Gold Diggers of 1933), one of Warner Bros.’ mainstays was the socially realistic melodrama Skyscraper Souls, definitely more serious and topical in its subject matter. Warren William (a great, often-overlooked actor) plays David Dwight, a banker and businessman who has gone far in debt to acquire a 100-story skyscraper in Manhattan. With creditors beating his door down and financial ruin around the corner, Dwight devises a complicated scheme in which he merges his bank with another, prompts a buying spree of his stock, artificially inflates it, and then leaves the stockholders high and dry, willfully ruining their finances and lives. Meanwhile, young and comely Lynn (O’Sullivan) tries to evade his lecherous advances while also fending off bank teller Tom (Foster). Director Selwyn managed to flesh out his characters to a surprising degree. One of the movie’s more salient points, however, is the financial shenanigans pulled off by the unscrupulous Dwight; such speculation and double dealings were exactly what helped bring about the stock market crash and Great Depression a few years earlier. When confronted by one of his main stockholders and accused of treachery, Dwight responds, “I’m not a double crosser. If I double crossed for you and you profited from it, I’d be a financial genius.” The skyscraper’s gleaming deco interiors provide a stark contrast to the conditions faced by the average American in the Thirties; Dwight will stop at nothing to keep his towering monument to his own bloated ego. The movie’s point shouldn’t be lost on today’s audiences, considering Wall Street’s fluctuations of late. Again, this is a film, with its lingerie scenes and racy double entendres, that couldn’t have been made after Will Hays was hired by studio executives to enforce the Production Code by monitoring the content of Hollywood productions.

The next year William reprised his role in Employees’ Entrance, playing the ruthless head of a department store faced with falling revenues during the Depression. As the loathsome Kurt Anderson, William summarily fires vendors, employees, and board members with equal offhandedness. In his tyrannical drive to retrench and keep the store profitable, he thinks nothing of canning employees with 20 or more years of service. He toys idly with whichever woman strikes his fancy and offers pretty Madeline (Young) a better job — after seducing her. Madeline falls for Martin West (Ford) but is ashamed of her “career move” with Anderson. (Anyone ever heard of “sexual harassment”?) Martin, on the other hand, becomes Anderson’s personal assistant and has to grapple with the ethics of doing business Anderson’s way. Del Ruth was one of the masters of the B-movies, directing almost 100 movies during his 40-year career. In the late Twenties and early Thirties, there were three to five Del Ruth films released each year (six in 1933). The director is better known for lighthearted musicals and other such fare, but got his start helming gritty melodramas like Employees’ Entrance. He gives the film a tremendous momentum, making it into a pulp novel hybrid of lurid, topical drama and ill-fitting comedy. With its implicit sex and the fact that crime (or at least unethical business) does indeed pay, this is another film that could never have been green-lighted after the Hays Code. A sample line: When sexy Alice White refuses to seduce Martin at Anderson’s order, Anderson asks, “Since when did you have any principles?” White: “Oh, I saved one or two out of the wreckage.”

This article appears in May 5 • 2000.