If there’s a totally distinctive American contribution to the comic pantheon it’s probably the confidence-artist as the quintessential modern character. Clever servants and tricksters abound in tales from the Old Worlds, but they are usually outsiders of a stable village or court society. Now and then a royal pretender arrives on the scene like the False Dimitri in the Russian Time of Troubles, or various Ruritanian aristocrats would appear in elegant salons to conduct seances, but even they underscore that it’s in times of dislocation and mobility that con-artists flourish. When folks can’t trace itinerants’ identities, it’s easier to sell them a line of baloney. And the greatest weapon against the suckers in the open air is the sales pitch, the torrential mix of hope-giving images and a verbal pace that’s as dazzling as a magic trick at warp speed. The American template may have been the Duke and Dauphin in Huckleberry Finn, the probable source of W.C. Fields’s personae. But the true promise of the modern con-artist wasn’t realized until the targets ceased to be the rubes in the sticks, who were so slow even Fields could expect a reward from them. It was when the carnivals and circuses hit bigger towns and smaller cities, where they could become the vehicles for selling everything under the sun, regardless of truth or worth.
American comedy loved these figures. They created business, provided entertainment, delivered wondrous placebos and linguistic pyrotechnics — a language created by constant movement, speed, drive, and fantasy, totally untethered from morality and class. The movies of the 30s couldn’t get enough of them. While Lubitsch’s urbane crooks were still Euro-impostors playing on the weaknesses of the very rich, most of the early Hollywood con-artists were self-creators with no aims other than money and what money could buy — gold diggers, promoters, rumor mongering reporters, theatrical producers, and ad men.
The male star who captured all this best at the time was Lee Tracy. Film historians usually remark on Tracy’s speed of delivery and word-count per minute. They rarely go deeper to consider what it took to speak that way and to move his body in tandem with his words. For me, Tracy was a brilliant actor mainly because he was a brilliant speaker. His style was already becoming old fashioned in the early 30s. It’s not naturalistic, at least not for middle class parlors. It was naturalistic, though, for the bombastic and fervid performances from open-air soapboxes and stage follies. I wish people who know how to do it would study Tracy’s style. Not only does he speak in paragraphs, the words he delivers are dazzling and funny, and viewers may easily ignore how hard it is to say them with such brilliant inflection and emphasis. Tracy had the gifts of a comic actor of both the stage and early sound film. He was always dialed to ten, but it took hard careful work to be effective at that speed.
On to The Half-Naked Truth, one of Tracy’s best films. It’s not well known and it’s referred to by film scholars only glancingly. I think it’s also one of its director’s, Gregory LaCava’s best films. The pace of the plot is perfectly synced with the pace of Tracy’s patter. Here’s the plot: Jimmy Bates (Tracy) is a carnival barker hustling customers to gape at exotic hootchie dancing Teresita (Lupe Velez) as she performs “the sacred dance of the muscles” that “makes the old grow young and the young grow gay.” But Jimmy has higher ambitions. And a good thing, too, since the carnival is wasting away — literally. The strong man is too weak to lift his own arms, the snake charmer has quit (“too bad,” says Jimmy, “we could’ve eaten that python”), and the fat girl is down to 112 pounds. Jimmy wants to replace the carnival’s lazy (and unpaid) public relations man. Jimmy knows what the public really wants:
“Now that doom has struck the old time carney, the day of Depression is past. The day of reconstruction is here! Bucolic gentry will no longer pay for the Old Faldaldo. You can no longer sell the Fat Lady for a dime. The Day of the Snake is over! The Strong Man shall weep. The world is greased with banana oil. Banana oil, professor! The people want excitement, sensation! Baloney and we’ve got to give it to ’em, Colonel. I’m tellin’ ya! We’ve got to give it to ’em.”
After Teresita tries to shoot Jimmy in a jealous rage (a plot point comically exploiting Velez’s real-life stabbing of lover Gary Cooper the year before), he concocts a sensational idea. He dishes out a story that Teresita will reveal at a performance that night the identity of the father she never knew, who happens to be in that very town. Jimmy and his sidekick, the escape artist Achilles (Eugene Pallette), single out the squirming men in the crowd and subtly shake them down for “conscience money.” Jimmy’s plan runs afoul of the law, leading to a beautiful brawl, in the course of which Jimmy, Teresita (aka “The Tamale”), and Achilles escape. Next stop, Broadway. (I love this brawl. If one ever broke out at Burning Man, it would be like this.)
Arriving in New York, Jimmy hatches a new plan on the fly when he realizes the city “is a bigger sap town” than he thought. Posing as the manager for “Princess Exotica” (impersonated by Teresita) who escaped from a Turkish harem in the company of her “harem gentleman” (impersonated by Achilles), Jimmy ensconces the crew in a top-rung hotel and embarks on a quest to have Teresita hired by follies impresario Merle Farrel (Frank Morgan). To build her cachet, Jimmy invites a press gaggle to interview the “Princess” while she lunches — a lunch that includes thirty pounds of raw meat for “Stamboul,” who turns out to be a pet lion that Jimmy has procured from a Coney island sideshow.
Farrell, reluctant at first, is gradually charmed by Teresita, and hires her to dance a ludicrously kitschy-“tasteful” oriental dance that stimulates the audience to head for the lobby. Jimmy intervenes and has her return to her hoochie roots, to the delight of the returning crowd.
Btw, that’s the great musical director/composer Max Steiner conducting the orchestra. (I love scenes in which music directors like Steiner and Leo Forbstein get to play comic conductors.)
Things get complicated. Farrell begins to court The Tamale in his timid, dithering Frank Morgan way, and he also resents Jimmy’s high-pressure tactics. Jimmy’s not too happy about Teresita starting to ditch him for Farrell, who can secure her career in the Follies. He captures a particularly embarrassing moment between them on film. Jimmy is fired as Farrell’s press agent, and he appears to take it all in stride, but he leaves a little taste of his p.r. power behind. It’s a funny, surprising scene.
But Jimmy has more plans to get even. Now with his own shop, he enlists his chambermaid Gladys (Shirley Chambers) to become the star of his next sensation, which will be a nudist revue that he’ll trick Farrell into staging. In the same way that he bamboozled the press and Farrell with “Princess Exotica,” he creates a “nudist cult” and brings the press to interview its leader, “Eve,” “the mother of a new race.” Pallette has never looked funnier. According to some accounts the set up parodies a recent nudism fad in L.A.
The pièce de resistance and proof of his baloney power is when Jimmy organizes a “nudist parade” down 5th Avenue, which naturally attracts crowds and clogs traffic.
Jimmy makes his play — in exchange for the negative of the compromising photo, Farrell signs Gladys to a contract, effectively unloading Teresita. Farrel even gets into the idea of a tasteful naked revue, complete with a March of the Nudists. But Achilles tires of the city and yearns to return to the carny life. So he buys the old carnival and invites Jimmy to go with him as the ballyhoo man to reconstitute the old combination. Jimmy wants none of it. He’s too happy in New York “where the oyster shells are soft and the suckers yell for the hook.” But soon enough, and to his annoyance, he hears the call. Up to this point there hasn’t been much music at all, outside Velez’s routines. For a good while I was wondering what Max Steiner actually did as music director. There’s basically no underscore. But then it comes with a vengeance. The Tamale’s signature tune comes at him from the traffic outside, and the squeaking of his chair. Things have gone crazy in New York.
Audiences at the time might have been aware of how much the story was based on a real person, the famed press agent, Frank Reichenbach, “the Father of the Ballyhoo,” on whom Jimmy’s character is said to be based, and from whose career some of Jimmy’s stunts were based (including the Stamboul gag). (There’s a nice little description of him at Immortal Ephemera.) But I don’t think that bit of real knowledge is necessary to appreciate The Half-Naked Truth. I think it deserves to be admitted to the canon. It’s one of La Cava’s funniest and most distinctive films. Like Leo McCarey, La Cava was a true screwball director, fusing physical slapstick and its verbal equivalent. Early in his career he had worked with W.C. Fields and animated cartoons. Later he would direct My Man Godfrey. La Cava rewrote scripts constantly on the set, supplying the funniest gags — his relationship with the volatile Tracy must have been fascinating. It’s hard to keep your eyes off Tracy, but the entire cast is in a state of giddy joy throughout. Everyone is a ham, and that’s how it’s supposed to be. The film is literally carnivalesque — with an emphatically American take. Jimmy does the circuit from being a barker among the rubes to its high-power version in the urban entertainment industry, then choosing to return to the roots. The film is often mentioned as a satire on entertainment and publicity, but I think it’s better seen as a straight-on comedy. There are no bad guys in it, really, since the trickster Jimmy is really in it for the fun of it. If Sturges’s later Sullivan’s Travels is about American life viewed as a “cockeyed carnival,” The Half-Naked Truth is literally that story.