I haven’t written much about Capra’s comedies so far because so much has been written about them already that it’s hard to screen out the noise and to say something new. For the record, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town was revelatory for me when I first saw it some fifty years ago. It was the film that showed me how artistically interesting classical Hollywood comedies could be. It’s also the last of Capra’s comedies that I care for. It was the template for the Capracorn yet to come, but it was still its own film. All the popular films that came after it strike me as smooth, technically dazzling, audience-manipulating, affected artifacts. I like the freewheeling, almost carefree comedies of the early ’30s much more. (And here I’ll even confess that I’m not crazy about It Happened One Night, the film that supposedly initiated the Hollywood Golden Age of talkie comedy.)
Lady for a Day is a consensus member of the High Canon of those comedies, and yet it’s much more rarely shown, discussed, and gushed over. It was a lot more risky an enterprise than most of the popular Capra movies. It has no superstar actors; its central character is an old woman played by the 70-year old May Robson; and its cinematic sensibility is much closer to the silents’ lumpen melodramas and hopscotch comic editing than to the silky smooth polish of the late 30s and early 40s. If you know it’s a Capra film, it’s easy to see his mark; but you could also fool a novice into thinking it was made by Gregory La Cava or Leo McCarey. And that’s a good thing.
Lady for a Day is famously based on a Damon Runyon magazine story, “Madame La Gimp.” It’s basically a Cinderella story (by far the most popular fairytale template in Depression-era Hollywood). Apple Annie (Robson), a gin swilling old woman compelled to sell apples on the street, who is actually a once-elegant dame down on her luck, maintains the pretense to her beloved daughter sojourning in Europe that she is living in her old high style. The daughter is now engaged to the son of a Spanish Condé and is bringing him, the grandee, and his entourage to New York to meet her mother. Annie’s crew of streetwise friends, led by a gang boss known as Dave the Dude (Warren William), organizes a theatrical ruse to prevent said daughter and entourage from learning the truth, by creating a faux upper class persona and environment for Mama.
The story is ripe for the Pathetic Mama treatment that was popular in early cinema, and Capra does deliver some world-class sentimental melodramatic scenes between mother and daughter. But like Little Miss Marker, made a year later from another popular Runyon story, the film has more edge than the story. There has been a lot of fog about Capra’s relationship to his best screenwriter-collaborator, Robert Ryskin. Capra was not a particularly generous-minded collaborator when it came to giving Ryskin credit where it was due, but contemporary accounts indicate that they worked very closely together on their great films, Ryskin providing more sardonic sociological edge than Capra was inclined to deliver, but Capra coming up with so many original ideas on a daily basis that he joined the echelon of La Cava and McCarey as directors who rewrote scripts on the spot, day to day. Runyon himself credited both Lady for a Day and Little Miss Marker as being better than his own original stories. I certainly agree with that. The difference, especially in Lady for a Day, is that the story expands into being not only about Apple Annie and Dave the Dude, but about Hollywood comedy itself. Capra was not a metageneric intellectual — but until he became the resident moralist of Tinsel Town, he had a brilliant sense of satire to go along with his sentimentality.
One of Ryskin’s innovations was to make Dave the Dude depend on Apple Annie for his luck. The Dude is played by Warren William, in my view an underrated comic actor of the period. William had an illustrious career in the early 30s — he was a slow-burn William Powell, playing elegant impostor con-men early on (like Powell himself), actually replacing Powell as private detective Philo Vance, even playing the ersatz Sam Spade in Satan Met a Lady, and eventually settling in as the super-lawyer himself in Warner Bros.’s PERRY MASON series. He also had excellent comic chops. Capra apparently was nervous enough about making a film starring a 70-year old woman to want Jimmy Cagney to play The Dude; when that didn’t work out, he wanted Powell. It’s a good thing that didn’t work out, either; either one would have tipped the balance toward himself. With the less illustrious William, the story is able spread out into an ensemble production.
The scene is set: Dave the Dude will gamble on anything — even on which sugar cube will be preferred by a housefly — but he’s deeply, superstitiously dependent on the luck he believes he acquires by buying apples from Apple Annie.
Meanwhile, Annie is harboring a secret unbeknownst to The Dude, that she has been concealing her fall from social grace from her daughter by pretending to be a high-class old dame living at a fancy hotel, through which she has directed her motherly correspondence. When the clerk on whose good offices she has depended at the the hotel is fired, despair sets in.
Annie manages to play the hotel staff’s heartstrings enough to procure her daughter’s most recent letter, the one announcing her engagement to a Spanish scion and that they are arriving on the next boat. Already clear at this point is how Capra is distributing the action horizontally to a wide range of characters.
William’s Dude shows no sign of being a sentimental softie. He only cares about Annie as his lucky charm. But then he’s visited by Annie’s supporting crew of down and out street mugs, and he realizes that his charm may be in trouble and unreachable. He needs to extend himself to make sure his golden goose is okay.
Dave the Dude, it turns out, knows nothing about Apple Annie’s life — where she lives, who she was, or that she even has a daughter. When he tracks her down in her in her tenement basement flat, she’s on an abject gin bender. She shows The Dude her daughter’s letter, terrified at the prospect of ruining her daughter’s happiness should the rich aristocrats find out the truth about her.
I like this scene a lot. It displays one of Capra’s finer gifts, the pairing of the histrionics of a highly emotional character with the dignified quiet of a reserved one who acts as a sort of stabilizing mechanism. For all its accolades — the film was nominated for a Best Picture Oscar, Capra was nominated for Best Director, Ryskin for Best Screenplay, and May Robson for Best Actress — it’s rare to see much enthusiasm directed to Warren William for his Dude. Contemporary reviews noted his customary professionalism, but not much more. For me, William is at least as central as Robson herself. It’s one of those happy Hollywood accidents that Capra could not get Cagney or William Powell for the role as he had hoped. Cagney would have lit up the joint, and Powell would have played it with sparkly irony. William, by contrast, plays it with an innerness neither Cagney nor Powell would have provided. The key for me in this scene is the way The Dude silently reads the letter in shadow as Annie flails in the light. We are left to wonder what he’s thinking. He hardly moves, and shows he’s all the more moved.
The Dude’s height is an important aspect of his character. (Powell was 5’11, Cagney 5’5, William a tall 6’1.) In Capra’s mise-en-scène, he’s shown often looking down deep in thought, as if The Dude is constantly discovering feelings elicited by Annie. Even though the story ostensibly centers on mother-daughter schmaltz, the real story is how The Dude accidentally becomes a caring surrogate son, sans schmaltz. Here are some examples of The Dude’s shaded quiet.
Annie’s mug-cohort pleads with The Dude to help her, inciting a social chain of events with a pure Capraesque soul. The Dude’s dull but voluble capo, “Shakespeare” (Nat Pendleton), suggests that The Dude connect with a high-society associate of his who owns an apartment in an elite hotel, and ask to borrow his digs for a few days. It happens, and The Dude designs a scheme for deceiving daughter and Spanish aristocrats about Annie’s social position. When his perpetually dour associate “Happy” (Ned Sparks) protests that The Dude is wasting his time not taking care of business, Dave the Dude gives voice to those inner thoughts he’s been hatching: he can’t count on Annie providing him with further luck if he doesn’t help her out. It has been a grudging process, but The Dude has arrived at the bare bones of an ethics.
Ah! but to carry the pretense through, not only must Annie undergo a makeover to appear as an elegant matron, she has to have an appropriate husband. Lacking a real one, The Dude has to dig one up himself. Capra originally wanted W.C. Fields for the role of Judge Blake. That might well have worked, but Fields was unavailable, so the studio cast Guy Kibbee for the role. Another wonderful accident. It’s one of his cleverest roles. Judge Blake is a sly old pool shark with a silver tongue, who makes his living taking rubes for everything they’ve got. In this great scene, The Judge takes on “The Man from Providence” — yet another mark that providence has delivered to him.
The plan gets tangled when The Dude’s boys forcibly sequester some reporters to prevent them from becoming too interested in the arrival and marriage plans of the Count and his family — gossip-columnist snooping that would inevitably foul The Dude’s plans for Annie. The cops get interested in the kidnapping lite. And even more interested when clues point to Dave the Dude, who has been on the cops’ radar for some time.
Central to the Annie plan — and more importantly, to the movie — The Dude has to arrange a society reception for the Count and his entourage, which requires him to gather and train his crew of ruffians and Annie’s friends from the street. In another great comic scene, one of the best in this film full of Big Group Scenes, the once-fatalist Dude becomes the director of a big show, showing off Capra’s gifts as a satirist, a trait he’s not praised for sufficiently.
For anyone viewing the film with some knowledge of the comedies of the time — and surely for the contemporary audiences — the scene plays uncannily like a loving send-up of the fraught rehearsal scene in 42nd Street, which had premiered only six months before Capra’s film.
Though Lady was a Columbia studio project, it could easily be mistaken for a Warner project of the time. Ned Sparks and Guy Kibbee were core supporting characters in 42nd Street. What’s more, William had appeared in Warner’s Gold Diggers of 1933 (as did Sparks and Kibbee again) in one of his funniest roles, as Dick Powell’s stiff brahmin brother, J. Lawrence Wentworth. And in places, The Dude has some striking similarities in appearance to the earlier film’s impresario, Julian Marsh (Warner Baxter).
Unlike the smooth as silk Capra films yet to come, Lady for a Day is carnivalesque in the way it collects genres — melodramatic weepie, backstage drama, gangster noir, political corruption comedy — in the service of a unified narrative. And each genre-specific sequence is filmed with the appropriate techniques. The famous Capra sentimentality is played to the hilt, from the deep melancholy of Annie’s tenement flat to the high silvery mist of the mother-daughter reunion.
Lady is the most Sturges-like of Capra’s films, at least in one respect. Capra’s later moralistic films were usually about endemic corruption, and he mastered the depiction of the chain of command of hacks and lackeys as they bully each other and pass the bucks. In films like Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, these political gangs were unambiguously venal, but Lady‘s corrupt hierarchy is comic, and gets off scot-free. Sturges would use the same technique of layered political bossing in film after film, always for comic purposes, never moral ones.
The authorities have wind that The Dude is responsible for the reporters’ disappearance and begin to lean on him. Fearing that they’ll arrest him before Annie’s grand fête can be performed, The Dude goes to the Chief Inspector to make a deal: he’ll deliver the reporters, but only if the cops hold off on harassing him for this one night. It’s no deal, but the terrifying possibility that he’ll be blamed for not finding the reporters on his own leads the Chief Inspector to pass The Dude up the chain of command. (Another interesting scene: it’s played and filmed like a gangster flick, until The Dude delivers his story to the Chief: “do you believe in fairy tales?”)
It appears that the gig is up. Shakespeare gets a call from The Dude to call the whole thing off, since he’s now in custody. Annie and her crew are despondent. But in the famous surprise ending, the whole hierarchy of authority — commissioner, mayor, and governor — appear at the gala reception, each offering their respects to Annie as if she were indeed an aristocratic doyenne. To put a cherry on top, they provide a police escort for Annie to take her daughter back to the ship waiting to take her and her new high-born family back to Europe. We are encouraged to forget all the petty threats, ethical close-shaves, and investigations snuffed that had to have led to the festive, Annie-validating outcome. All’s well that ends well, doncha know.
One of the things that I find fascinating about Lady for a Day is the way Capra constructed the character of Dave the Dude cinematically. Capra regularly illuminates his female characters, who are usually gorgeous stars — Jean Harlow, Jean Arthur, Barbara Stanwyck, Claudette Colbert, Myrna Loy. He lavishes them with beautiful close-ups and romantic auras. Annie’s May Robson is no drop dead starlet, but Capra devotes a great deal of attention to her transformation from an abject old lady in darkness to a shining grande dame.
Many other characters are given interesting, active, and varied framing, from major supporting characters to street people filmed in dynamic documentary style. All but one: William’s Dave the Dude. It’s surprising, to say the least, that The Dude is never framed in a close-up, and as far as I can tell, there are only two shots in which he holds the frame alone in a single shot, one of which is when he’s pretending to be someone else (his silly imitation of a Chinese houseboy). Surprising, and from a certain perspective stunning. Capra didn’t only direct close ups of his female stars, there are plenty of striking close-ups of his famous male stars, too, in later films.
It’s arguable, I guess, that this sort of close-up “feminizes” the male stars in a way that would be incompatible with Dave the Dude’s macho bearing. But as I’ve tried to show, the film is as much about the Dude’s “softening” and innerness as it is about Annie’s coming out. And Warren William was a handsome man. He had plenty of sexy close-ups in his other films. So what gives? If you watch the film closely for the framing, it’s impressive how many different kinds of frame designs and body arrangements The Dude is placed in to show basically that he’s never alone.
Capra’s steady cinematographer, the brilliant Joseph Walker, was a master at creating character dimensions out of lighting and active, varied framing. So I have to believe this framing strategy for Dave the Dude was not only intentional, but was inspired by an idea close to Capra’s heart. While Longfellow Deeds and Jefferson Smith get all the attention as populist heroes, Dave the Dude is in many ways — narrative and cinematic — a more subtle and interesting man of the people. Deeds and Smith are, after all, almost always at the center of their films; their films are named for them. They are so heroic in their struggles to do good by the common people that they can only be depicted by Hollywood mega-stars. They are both, in the end, benevolent demagogues; even the reticent Yankee Deeds gets to make a couple of inspiring speeches. They were never potential President Hammonds of La Cava’s Gabriel Over the White House, who managed to combine Roosevelt and Mussolini, but Capra in the ’30s was a naive admirer of Mussolini and one can detect traces of emerging righteous populist leaders in Deeds and Smith, whose humility may not be enough to keep them from being swept into power like a hapless Preston Sturges victim of public love. Dave the Dude is made of different stuff. He’s not a righteous dude. He’s a gang boss. At first he cares about Annie’s well-being only in so far as he benefits from it materially. He has no reason to wish her to stop selling apples in the street. His slow evolution into Annie’s guardian and provider happens in spite of his gangster ethos and milieu. His relationship with Annie changes him, and makes him a better man. As with all the Runyon stories, there’s no backstory, not even folksy common-sense psychology. The way Capra-William-Walker conceive him, Dave the Dude is actually shy about his emotional enlightenment. He has no place to put it in his world. Capra, unusually for him, refuses to place The Dude front and center, separated from others by his nobility and ethical beauty, just as The Dude refuses to magnify his good deed beyond the specific case: it’s all happening for Annie. He won’t tolerate moralizing. And most unlike those little Lincolns, Deeds and Smith, he refuses to articulate. The audience is free to imagine larger symbolic connections, but The Dude will have none of it. It’s a “fairy tale,” pure and simple. He can command the loyalty of his criminal crew, he can welcome the supplications of Annie’s street family, he’s a Big Man in his world. You’d think he’d get a close up. Instead, in his little operation of benevolence, he’s revealed as truly embedded among others. He may be an outlaw, but he’s manifestly a man of the people.
And this may help explain the ethically bizarre ending. Sturges would have motivated it as political absurdity, corruption for comic effect. (The endings of both Miracle of Morgan’s Creek and Hail the Conquering Hero seem to me affectionate satires of this aspect of Capra.) The political bigs who worried about covering their asses become generous, genteel courtiers for a day. Their motives may not be pure (truth is, we don’t entirely know what their motives are), but their gestures of kindness and respect are genuine. They behave like Gentlemen for a Day, just like The Dude, the gang boss. There’s no guarantee at the end of the film that The Dude will go straight (why would he?), or that the pols will, either. It’s the modesty of it all that stands out — and its image is of the Fairy Godfather (a surrogate son of an elderly Cinderella, in this case) who can’t conceive of standing out from others, and can’t be conceived that way anyway by the film. There was one grand transformation, Annie’s. Whether it leads to others, who can say? It’s a moment of comic bonheur only, but that’s its beauty. A generous comic ending is only for a day.