Public Deb No. 1 is a very odd movie. Most of the world must think so, too, because it’s very hard to find. There’s at least one youtube upload of it, but it’s a horrible dupe from a VHS. My college library says it’s only available in 16mm film, and from only one source, the UCLA Film and Television Archive. My copy is also from a VHS. Allmovie gives it a one star rating (out of five). Sounds like deserved oblivion, doesn’t it?
Wrong. Totally. It’s actually very funny and clever. It has a fine cast — George Murphy, looking younger than he should in 1940 (maybe an artifact of the print), Brenda Joyce, with a strong supporting crew of Ralph Bellamy, Mischa Auer, Franklin Pangborn, Charlie Ruggles (and the New York society queen Elsa Maxwell). It was directed by Gregory Ratoff, who may not be well known now but was one of Darryl F. Zanuck’s favorite directors. The camera was by the revered Ernest Palmer. This film wasn’t intended to be forgotten.
I think I know why it was, though. It must have caused everyone involved headaches with the House Unamerican Activities Committee. The comedy is overtly political, and it’s one of the very few films in which Marxist ideas are presented straight-up. They are also ridiculed — but so are the pretensions of the capitalists. It’s a funny story.
Brenda Joyce (an actress I knew nothing about) plays Penny Cooper, the heiress of the Cooper Soup fortune, who has fallen under the sway of her Russian Communist butler (played by Mischa Auer), and has become a Communist activist. She’s a Red, but also a famous capitalist heiress — so the courts give her a break she doesn’t want.
As a result of her highly publicized arrest, upstanding anti-Communist folks start a boycott against Cooper Soups. Meanwhile, she is being courted by Bruce Fairchild (The Bellamy, actually played by Ralph Bellamy), who is starting a run for Congress as an anti-Communist Republican. Penny is enthusiastic about it, and promises the Party’s backing for his candidacy because she thinks — much to Bruce’s horror — that Bruce will advance their cause.
So that evening Penny and Bruce have dinner at a Russian restaurant (of course), where Penny challenges a barely competent but relentlessly positive waiter, Alan (George Murphy), to declare his solidarity with his oppressed class. To her outrage, Alan won’t have any of it, and declares that he enjoys the American dream of becoming a millionaire from his lumpen position. Things become heated. Penny insult him and orders him to be fired. Alan notes the hypocrisy of her Bolshevism with Benefits, and even spanks her.
At this point, it’s not hard to see that a lot of viewers are squirming in their seats. This is one of Murphy’s good roles. He plays a committed capitalist, and he’ll be right at the end. (Murphy, of course, eventually became a conservative Republican senator down the road.) But the Marxist ideas that Penny spouts aren’t critiqued, just countered. Today’s audiences would have serious problems with the sexism that the story seems to approve — but Penny is an attractive character, and neither Murphy nor Bellamy can match her.
Penny has declared that she has no interest in money, and plans to sell the company, but her Bolshy butler persuades her — “Comrade Madame” — that the Movement needs her income, and she must continue in her role.
So she devises a plan to forgive Alan the waiter, free him from jail (he’s in for assaulting her), and begin a public romance with him — all to deceive and distract. Alan is given a job at Cooper Soup, and takes it seriously — he considers it his lucky break and he wants to make the best of it. To recap: she’s a Communist heiress, and he’s a waiter aiming to become a CEO. The screwball friction between them is not the usual one. It’s political. But Alan, the man of the people, is a “real man.” He suspects — and verifies — that Penny is more easily reached through “the physical,” than through ideas. In other words, she cares about sex more than justice. Alan can deliver that by taking her dancing. It’s a fine, funny scene.
It doesn’t last, of course. Complications ensue. In order to embarrass Alan for his dominating ways, she invites him to a prestigious society party where everyone is expected to come in the costume of their favorite character from American history. This is really an inspired sequence. Elsa Maxwell comes dressed as Ben Franklin, and practically all the other males come dressed as Lincoln — including both Alan and Bruce. In a plot point that creates more squirms, Alan has Penny drink a slipped mickey to prevent her from reconciling with Bruce and gnashing her teeth at Alan.
The dialogue is sharp. The background music, typical of Fox at the time, is punchy dopamine music. Alan is acting in a way that would be sinister in any other movie. The politics is getting lost in this little zigzag romance, as Penny falls harder and harder for Alan’s “physicality.” When she sobers up, Penny decides that not only will she sell the company, she’ll give all the proceeds to The Party. Until, that is, news breaks that the Soviet Union has invaded Finland. For context: the film was released in 1940, the Soviets invaded Finland in 1939 and were still fighting the Finns in 1940. (From a historical perspective, Finland “won” the war — it lost a sizeable part of its territory but seriously injured the Soviet army, and prevented a major occupation.) Hearing the news, Penny is outraged at the Muscovite hypocrisy, repudiates her Bolshevism, and flies to the arms of capitalist Alan — even flinging her textbook for Communist revolution out the window.
Public Deb No. 1 is worth seeing. I’m not sure how well made it is because the zigzag of ideas occupies my attention. The ending seems to say that in America admiration for Communism can only be a beatnik fad, and that hardscrabble capitalist worker-idealists own the future. And those hardscrabble workers are sexist males. But most of the film doesn’t quite go there. The Bolshy Svengali butler is revealed to be an extortionist fraud, but Penny’s boxing coach (Penny herself lands a good punch), a Battling Finn, even says the butler’s not a good Communist. So the film is ambivalent, not because it doesn’t know what it believes, but because it gives both the Communist and the capitalist some credit, while also undermining them (not unsympathetically) for being into their retro sexual roles. Penny wants sex more than justice, but in the fashion of a Hollywood ending, the sex aligns with capitalism. Alan wants to be a millionaire male, but in the end his fortune depends on Penny. Mischa Auer’s butler proves to be a con-artist, but that is a capitalist specialty. The fact that he’s a Bad Bolshy does not really undermine Penny’s original idealism.
Public Deb No. 1 has probably been relegated to the ash heap of Hollywood history not because it’s a bad film, but because it elicits really complex responses from its audience about politics. It’s capitalist in the end, but not without landing blows against it. It’s sexist, but it easily could have been otherwise.
Gregory Ratoff, the director, was involved with several films — as director and as actor — that had to do with the overt collision of capitalism and Communism. A Jewish refugee from Soviet Russia, Ratoff saw both Bolshevism and capitalism as serious players in the world, both of them deeply flawed as ideals. I think of Public Deb No. 1 as a poor man’s Ninotchka — much less able to dismiss either of the dominant ideologies with Lubitsch’s light touch.
This is a film I hope will be restored, both physically and to film history.