Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with the next installment of A Movie A Week.
[For those who new to the column, A Movie A Week is just that, a dedicated way for me explore vintage cinema every week. I’ll review a movie every Monday and each one will be connected to the one before it via a common thread, either an actor, director, writer, producer or some other crew member. Each film, pulled from my DVD shelf or recorded on the home DVR (I heart TCM) will be one I haven’t seen.]
Wow, this movie really surprised me. Going into THE PUBLIC ENEMY I had certain expectations. It’s a classic, I’ve seen scenes and posters and stills from the movie since I’ve had more than a passing interest in cinema.
THE MAYOR OF HELL on the other hand is a movie I had never heard of, never heard mentioned in a film appreciation class or heard talked about in discussions about James Cagney’s career. The DVD came in one of the Warner Bros Gangsters Box Sets and the title jumped out at me.
I had to figure it’s a crime movie if included in a Gangster box set, but that title could mean any genre. It could be horror, crime, sci-fi, fantasy, war, drama… Great, great title.
Knowing only that the movie was called THE MAYOR OF HELL and that it starred James Cagney I threw it into the DVD player and gave it a spin. And it blew me away, in a lot of ways more than THE PUBLIC ENEMY.
Now, THE PUBLIC ENEMY has a special quality, the star exploding on screen magic and the iconography of that movie is more embedded into the fabric of pop culture, but I found THE MAYOR OF HELL to be a lot more fun and engaging.
I actually had a similar experience with a pair of Humphrey Bogart films that were shown as a double feature at the Paramount Theater a good 5 or 6 summers ago. The double bill was KEY LARGO and DARK PASSAGE. I hadn’t heard of the latter, but the former was a very well known film. And I really enjoyed KEY LARGO, but DARK PASSAGE hit me much harder. It’s a very inventive, smart and, most importantly, fun noir.
There’s a surprise factor that’s impossible to calculate and can sometimes push a movie from being just good to something that really gets its hooks into you. That’s what happened to me and this movie.
I think this was a case of my expectation being turned on its head for the better. The movie begins a lot like THE PUBLIC ENEMY. We’re following a gang of bad kids… but not really bad… likeably bad. They “watch” cars for people and by “watching them” they mean they don’t steal the radiator cap and let the air out of the tires if you give them a quarter.
A kid named Jimmy runs the gang and I was convinced this was the young version of James Cagney’s character, like in THE PUBLIC ENEMY. The kid, Frankie Darro, has the Cagney attitude and looked enough like him to have me sure I knew where the movie was going.
But he wasn’t. The movie’s about this gang getting sent before the judge after a robbery goes bad and someone gets hurt. Almost every single one of them is sentenced to a year at reform school.
In many ways this isn’t Cagney’s movie, but Frankie Darro’s (who is, in fact, the title character). Cagney shows up almost 25 minutes into the film as a Deputy Commissioner assigned to check over the state run institute, more prison than school. It’s a political appointment, meant mostly as a form of payoff. Cagney’s Patsy Gargen is a racketeer and can guarantee a certain amount of (dirty) votes for the Governor. Instead of paying Patsy in cash, the Gov. gives him a BS title that gives Cagney a government paycheck.
He doesn’t really give a shit about this new position, it’s just a little detour for him… a couple of days out of the city and then back leading the racket he’s been building up for 7 years.
Two things change Cagney. One, the most obvious, is he’s attracted to a progressive nurse (Madge Evans) fed up with the way the real mean baddie bossman of the reform school (Dudley Digges) runs the place, treating the kids like shit, only making them angrier and more violent.
The other factor is Frankie Darro. When Cagney shows up Darro tries to make a break for it and Cagney witnesses first hand how horrible Digges is and how these kids are getting shit on daily. Darro is badly injured trying to escape and that affects Cagney, mostly because I think he sees a lot of himself in Darro.
Which goes back to why director Archie Mayo cast this particular kid and why I was convinced at the beginning I was seeing the origins of Cagney’s character. There’s a physical resemblance to Cagney and, more importantly, a similar attitude.
Cagney then flexes his political muscle and gets put in charge of the reform school, transforming it alongside Evans into its own little world. The idea is to create an isolated government run by the kids where they have their own court, cops, lawyers, store, etc.
This experiment seems to work. Suddenly when holding these responsibilities like running the store, where kids use credits earned while doing the manual labor that was more like punishment under the last regime, they understand the position their previous victims were in. When one kid steals a candy bar under the watchful gaze of Izzy Horowitz (Sidney Miller), a crime that same kid did at the opening of the movie, he feels wronged and demands the police chief, the biggest mug of a kid in the school.
Of course this happy experiment is threatened by Digges who is determined to regain control… partly out of a bruised ego, but also out of a real survival instinct. The stuff he’s been doing as warden isn’t exactly on the legal side. There’s even hints of embezzlement as the kids are nearly starving.
This flick could have easily been a feel good light bit of fluff, but it goes into some pretty dark territory towards the end. The actual ending of the film is probably its weakest part, but the lead-up is pretty fucked… riots, kid-death, a grotesque plummet onto a barbwire fence as someone tries to escape an angry mob.
The ending itself wraps everything up way too neatly. There was murder committed and it is pretty much just a “Well, he deserved it, I think. Let’s go!” and that’s that. Seemed too easy and didn’t make much sense, but that didn’t ruin the movie for me.
There will be people turned off by the blatant racism in the movie, but I think it should be noted that Smoke (Allen ‘Farina’ Hoskins), the black kid in the group, is treated just as one of the gang by all the kids. The big liberal ass-puckering cringe moment comes in the court scene at the beginning of the movie as the kids and their parents are taken before the judge. Smoke’s dad is played by Fred “Snowflake” Toones who was a big character actor of the era, but always played the most racist “Yess’m, boss. Whateva yous says!” type characters. His character here is just that… a high pitched, slow-witted stereotype. That’s not to say he does a bad job, it just stands out.
Speaking of that courtroom scene, there’s an incredible one-scene performance by Dorothy Peterson as Darro’s mother who pleads with the judge to remand him into her custody. Her desperation and terror over losing her boy shows in her teary eyes as she grows more and more hysterical, screaming that her other son went into the Reform School a thief and came out a murderer. It’s an incredible piece of work that doesn’t feel like acting. She really captured the moment and it is an emotionally moving scene.
Also of note for those more sensitive viewers is the fact that the Jewish kid is automatically put in charge of the money in this new student government. But that’s all a product of the time. With the actual character work there’s surprising progressiveness shown.
Final Thoughts: IMDB lists great director Michael Curtiz (CASABLANCA, THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD, etc) as uncredited director under Archie Mayo. I don’t know how much input Curtiz had, but it’s not too surprising his touch is on this picture. It’s a damn good movie. So good in fact it was remade twice… first as a Humphrey Bogart vehicle called CRIME SCHOOL and then a Ronald Reagan film called HELL’S KITCHEN. I’m curious about the Bogie movie featuring The Dead End Kids… not so hot on the Reagan one. But no matter what, I highly recommend this film as an under-discussed gem of a flick.
Upcoming A Movie A Week Titles:
Monday, September 14th: MIDNIGHT MARY (1933)
Monday, September 21st: AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS (1956)
Monday, September 28th: THE TROUBLE WITH HARRY (1955)
You may have noticed that I didn’t add a new title to the line-up. The answer for that is simple… Starting October 1st I’m going to be switching gears to this year’s HMAD (Horror Movie A Day) which I started last year. That means 31 horror films, one a day from October 1st-31st. When I get to THE TROUBLE WITH HARRY I’ll publish the first week of HMAD titles. Gonna be fun… right now the gamut is run between Ingmar Bergman and Troma… it’s gonna be a blast.
See you folks next week as we follow producer Lucien Hubbard over to another pre-code flick, 1933’s MIDNIGHT MARY directed by THE PUBLIC ENEMY’s William A. Wellman. See you folks for that!
-Quint
quint@aintitcool.com
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