Ann Sheridan – Movie Musings

Soapy melodrama on the surface, viciously biting satire underneath – making it as two-faced as the town it’s about

Director: Sam Wood

Cast: Ann Sheridan (Randy Monaghan), Robert Cummings (Parris Mitchell), Ronald Reagan (Drake McHugh), Betty Field (Cassie Tower), Charles Coburn (Dr Henry Gordon), Claude Rains (Dr Alexander Tower), Judith Anderson (Harriet Gordon), Nancy Coleman (Louise Gordon), Kaaren Verne (Elise Sandor), Maria Ouspenskaya (Madame von Eln), Harry Davenport (Colonel Skeffington)

There are few things more idealised than the decent American small-town, where everybody knows your name and people leave their doors unlocked safe with their trusted neighbours. That ideal is comprehensively dismantled by Kings Row. Like some sort of proto-Twin Peaks, it presents a small-town that is all picket fences and porch swings on the surface, but a seething morass of petty jealousies, hypocrisies, lies, cruelties and sadism underneath. Kings Row was adapted from a best-seller by Henry Bellerman many considered unfilmable (among the things it features that are obscured in the film are incest and assisted suicide) and is a searingly successful melodrama.

Covering the 1890s to the 1910s, Kings Row follows the lives of four young people, all suffering from the older generation’s pettiness and wickedness. Parris Mitchell (Robert Cummings) is a young man, training to be a doctor, in love with his austere mentor Dr Tower’s (Claude Rains) sensitive daughter Cassie (Betty Field). His best friend Drake McHugh (Ronald Reagan) is an amiable lothario, denied engagement to Louise (Nancy Coleman), daughter of the snobby Dr Gordon (Charles Coburn) and his wife (Judith Anderson). After personal disasters and tragedies for both men, Parris travels to Venice to train as a psychiatrist and McHugh finds true love with daughter-of-the-railroad Randy (Ann Sheridan). But the dark forces of Kings Row demand a price from Drake.

Kings Row is a sensational plot-boiler, bought to life with great care and a delicious sense of the tender and salacious by Sam Wood. Working closely (again) with William Cameron Menzies on the design and tone, this must have been a glorious change of pace for the pair after the worthy (but flawed) Our Town, which treated similar ideas with reverence. There is none of that in Kings Row, with its frequent recourses to moody skies and Gothic storms via James Wong Howe’s Oscar-nominated expressionistic lighting of its imposing local buildings. This is not a town of homespun values and decency, but lean, mean cruelty and possessiveness, with dark secrets behind every door.

You get that sense from the start, as our characters bound around the town as children. As a young girl, Cassie Tower’s birthday party competes with the announcement Louise Gordon will hold hers on the same day. Sure enough, Parris alone attends Cassie’s – the humiliated torment of this girl at the head of a large empty table, loaded with food, is agonising – while the rest of the town piles into the Gordon’s party. This is a town that plays favourites, and the Gordons are at the top of the social tree. But then, the Towers are not pure as the driven snow. Rains gives a horrific air of quiet, suggestive menace to Tower’s controlling iciness, a grim ogre at the heart of his Gothic pile. Glimpses of Tower’s wife are seen upstairs, confined in isolation like Jane Eyre’s Bertha. His control extends over every inch of Cassie’s life, keeping her isolated and firmly in place.

This continues well into her adulthood – there is a lovely transition here, with a close up of young Parris’ foot stepping over a style with a distinctive brush of the surface, and his adult foot (with the same brush) crossing back over in the same shot – a control that has helped turn her into a flustered, anxious, neurotic, played with intensity by Betty Field. She still attracts the love of Robert Cummings – who does well in a rather thankless role as our quietly, stoic centre – but its doomed by her father’s possessive assumption that he knows what’s best for both her and Parris. The shockingly brutal action Tower takes – and the, on reflection, under-the-carpet brushing of this deed the powers that be carry out – is a clear sign this midwestern town is in fact a ghastly place.

Perhaps the only decent person of the older generation is Maria Ouspenskaya, very heartfelt as Parris’s Russian grandmother. As her health deteriorates, it’s commented by the town’s higher ups that with her passes an era of decent values: an inadvertent satirical comment in itself, since this representative of American values is a Russian accented immigrant. Real Kings Row values are controlled by the Gordon’s: Harriet (played by Judith Anderson in sub-Danvers form) is a bitter snob, while Charles Coburn’s Dr Gordon is the must unsettling character he ever played, a sadistic quack who refuses anaesthetic (and worse) to patients he deems morally inferior and treats the town’s working classes as his personal societal petri dish.

Perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that the one guy everyone in the town thinks is a nailed on cad, is the most decent guy there. Ronald Reagan never had a better role than Drake McHugh (his most famous line “Where’s the rest of me!” became the title of his first autobiography). Reagan makes Drake warm, likeable, refreshingly loyal and honest, a ladies man but also a man of his word, treating everyone around him with respect. Kings Row is, in many ways, a parade of events to crush his decency, losing the chance to forge his own business, his trust fund filched, his body mutilated by a sadist doctor.

The dramatic and emotional force ends up being our wish that Drake survives everything the town throws at him. He has the support of best friend Parris, a horrified witness to the evils around him, and Randy played with a charisma and charm by Ann Sheridan that makes an instant impact, despite only making her first appearance an hour into the film. Randy becomes the force of good and hope in the film: alongside her working-class family bastions of true decency, in a town where everyone else seems two-faced, wicked or willing to shove their heads in the ground pretending everything is fine.

After all, nothing can be allowed to rock the boat in Kings Row. You could argue Harry Davenport’s Colonel Skeffington, who good-naturedly wants to keep everything ticking over, is even the real villain. There seems to be nothing he won’t hush up: fraud, murder-suicide, an epidemic of surgical maiming… Nothing can challenge the idea Kings Row presents on a sign at the town’s boundary: it is “A Good Town. A Good, Clean Town. A Good Town to Live In and a Good Place to Raise Your Children”. Doth the town protest too much?

With this darkness and clear-eyed vision, Kings Row may frequently feel soapish, but it’s a vicious satire exploding a particular all-American ideal and exposing it as rotting garbage, a fountain of lies where the decent and vulnerable (like Drake and Cassie) suffer the most. It makes Kings Row, in its own way, one of the most consequential films of its kind, the sort of denunciation (dressed up as reassuring melodrama) that Hollywood would wait decades before daring to repeat.

Cagney lets rip in this classic gangster film which is all about its barn-storming ending

Director: Michael Curtiz

Cast: James Cagney (Rocky Sullivan), Pat O’Brien (Father Jerry Connolly), Humphrey Bogart (Jim Frazier), Ann Sheridan (Laury Martin), George Bancroft (Mac Keefer), The Dead End Kids

It has perhaps the most famous ending of all gangster films. Faced with his final few minutes on Death Row, charismatic gangster Rocky Sullivan meets with his oldest friend, Father Jerry O’Connell. Rocky is a hero to the kids on the block, and Father Jerry pleads with him: go the chair yellow and just maybe you can help turn these kids away from a life of crime. No way Rocky is going to lose his pride – until the final few moments, when suddenly he collapses into a morass of whimpering fear and terror. Did he decide to listen to Jerry’s pleading? Or did he really go yellow after all?

It’s the question that you are meant to take from Angels with Dirty Faces, a superb example of the gangster genre, brilliantly directed by Michael Curtiz. And it works so well because quite simply no other actor in the history of film could have pulled it off as well as Cagney does. If you have any doubts about whether Cagney deserves to stand as one of the truly greatest film actors of all time, this film erases them.

Cagney is simply superb as Rocky. Has there ever been a gangster who was so charismatic, so magnetic, so strangely decent in his way, who plays in the corrupt world of crime but has his own absolutely rigid moral code? Few other actors could have you so ready to believe he would ruthlessly pull the trigger at the drop of the hat, and yet would still be someone you’d consider inviting round for dinner. Every single scene hinges on his brilliance as a performer, and his interaction with each character is superbly judged. He is an unapologetic bad guy, a man who openly says that he isn’t sure he is capable of empathy in the same way as normal people, yet he also has a fierce sense of loyalty and doesn’t hesitate to take the rap for others or to put himself in harm’s way to protect those he feels loyalty towards.

It’s all part of the intriguing moral puzzle of the film, that rather bravely inverts the idea of good and evil that the Hays Code mandated. On the surface this is a Board approved plot of two kids from the wrong end of the block, one who ends up good one who ends up bad, with the bad one getting his comeuppance and the good saving souls all around. But scratch the surface and actually this is a film that is making far more subtle points about a world that is in shades of grey. For starters, the most faithful and loyal character in the film is the hoodlum Rocky.

But more than that, the film stresses that the margin between priest and criminal is very thin indeed. Repeatedly it’s stressed that Jerry is only a priest – rather than a fellow criminal graduate of the reform system like Rocky – because he was able to run away faster from the police during their days of mayhem as tearaway boys. It only takes chance and a few lucky turns, and the priest owes his ability to find God and the good life solely because the criminal happily took the whole rap as a Kid. The priest and the criminal work almost hand-in-hand trying to encourage the local kids to engage more in their community (even if they are teaching subtly different lessons) and their friendship is unaffected by the events of the film.

Much as the film is building a traditional narrative of crime being attractive but not in the end paying, it is also subtly suggesting that good and evil perhaps coexist in harmony more than we might think (or might be comfortable to acknowledge). Which brings us back to the title I guess: Jerry is an angel with a dirty face from his flawed childhood, but in a way Rocky himself is an angel whose face is covered with the muck of crime. Both characters have lives that have crime and misdemeanours behind them, even if they have eventually chosen different routes.

Curtiz’s film allows this commentary to bubble subtly and cleverly under a host of wonderful scenes and carefully composed sequences. The highlight of which might well be an extraordinarily well made extended shoot out scene, as Rocky faces his final show down with the cops after one crime too many. But it’s a peak of a series of superb sequences that make excellent use of framing and intent. Curtiz even makes the Dead End Kids – a group of, I’ll be honest, rather irritating child actors, whose fates I find it hard to get worked up about – reasonably engaging. There are several other fabulous performances, not least a wonderfully snivelling turn from Humphrey Bogart as a cowardly and corrupt lawyer with more than a few criminal connections.

It all comes back to that final sequence as events catch up with Rocky and the electric chair awaits. Cagney is simply brilliant in this scene, a perfect steel front of composure and pride that we are invited to question whether it cracks or he does so deliberately. Curtiz shoots the sequence in shadow play (apart from one shot of Rocky’s hands clinging desperately to a radiator) – to meet the Hays Code rules about what you could and couldn’t show on screen, the chair being a no – but it works superbly and Cagney’s powerhouse but also restrained performance nails it perfectly. While you like to think Rocky has done the “right thing” you can’t be sure – and it’s that question that hangs over it that helps cement this as a brilliant inversion of the black-and-white morals of the era: we like to think decency has prevailed, but maybe it’s all just being yellow after all…