Fox made three Runyonesque comedies in the early 40s starring Cesar Romero — Tall, Dark and Handsome, A Gentleman at Heart, and Dance Hall. All were witty, full of surprising turns, and well crafted. And all were produced as B-movies. While folks have varied judgments about Dance Hall (it was panned at the time, prints are hard to find, but I love it), the first two are bona fide contributions to the genre of crime comedy.
If crime films were a quintessentially American film genre, then I guess crime comedies must count as quintessential American comedies. As Prohibition faded from social consciousness and the Hays Code’s prohibition against bad guys being too attractive became a rule, the time was right for making fun of Americans’ love of violent con artists. The trend started with the series of Edward G. Robinson’s self-parodies — beginning with The Little Giant in 1933 and culminating almost a decade later with Larceny, Inc. in 1942. I think that in that period Robinson played more satires on his psychopathic bullying bantam persona in Little Caesar than he played any straight gangsters. The thread through all of them was the Code-friendly theme of a Prohibition gang boss trying to go legit — which mainly meant trying to acquire some class — and facing obstacles high and low on the way.
There was another line running parallel to the struggles of Little Caesar going straight: the affable Runyonesque boss who always had a heart of gold somewhere in there. His cinematic model was Dave the Dude in Capra’s Lady for a Day. The Dude avoided violence, cruelty, and bullying. A handsome dandy, he was a streetwise CEO with a crew and a gun that he never fires. And since he was also a man who rose from the streets, he had a tendency to keep his sights local and his language low and snappy.
Though it’s rarely mentioned, Fox’s B-films at the time were often subtly, but distinctively, iconoclastic. Film historians stress that the studio’s non-prestige fare depended on formulaic serials like The Cisco Kid, Mister Moto (starring Peter Lorre), Charlie Chan, among others, and ostensibly formulaic comedies with Sonja Henie and Betty Grable. In retrospect, those B-products were often made with A-level technical values and a certain ironic, self-deprecating grit that made the distinction between A and B fuzzy. The studio head Darryl Zanuck was famous for valuing and keeping tabs on the script-writing, having begun his career as a proud script man. For Romero’s two crime comedies — Tall, Dark and Handsome and A Gentleman at Heart –, the studio made sure they had an original streak. Formulaic on the surface, they were full of witty surprises.
Gangster comedies are invariably about the ambition to rise in class, to go not necessarily straight, but up. The archetypal American theme of being stuck between the rock of egalitarian self-respect and the hard place of class-envy takes on a particularly savage tone in the gangster genre of the early 30’s. The gang bosses are lumpen capitalists who take advantage of capitalism’s close kinship to crime. They’re psychopathic businessmen, resentful that their obvious success in money-making and controlling their markets, their power, their riches, their influence, their expensive clothes and cars, can’t make the Old Money accept them. It only makes the high-class families despise them more, and fuels their resentment. The comic versions of this template replace the anti-social violence with ridicule. It’s not easy to go straight. A romance with a high-class deb provides the usual incentive. And since noir violence has no place in comedy, the gangster-boss-as-comic-hero has usually graduated from the use of force to the force of a clever mind instead.
A Gentleman at Heart elevates the formula, the boss, and the setting. It’s by far one of the most “sophisticated” Fox comedies of the period in terms of craft. Maybe not as free as Tall, Dark and Handsome, it’s smarter and more intricate, with subtler threads. It appears to be streetwise, but like a good French farce its tricks and traps are elegantly tight.
Tony Miller (Romero) operates a high-volume illegal bookmaking operation in New York City. We first meet him consulting with his accountant about making sure his taxes are in order. (It’s an interesting riff — perhaps to make it clear to the audience that Tony is not about to be nailed for tax-evasion like Al Capone, or closer to home, like Fox’s own Chairman, Joseph Schenck, in 1941.) Tony has found out that his main henchman-fixer, Lucky (Milton Berle), has been making secret bets pretending to be a rich Englishman and accruing sizeable debts under this fake identity. Tony gives him an ultimatum: produce $5,000 in 24 hours or face the music.
The inaptly named Lucky heads out to scratch up the money from his grifter associates, all as inaptly named as himself — the fake blind man Lighthouse and the heavy Tiny. Fakes and misdirections abound. His efforts unrewarded, Lucky is about to skip town when he finally does get hit with a stroke of luck. An uncle he hardly knew (he was too honest for the family to care about) has died and bequeathed a 5th Avenue art gallery to him.
Tony thinks the gallery might be sold for the money he’s owed. Off they go to case the joint. Need it be said that neither Tony nor Lucky knows a damn thing about art. At the gallery — which looks like a “telegraph office” to Lucky, and a “front for a joint” to Tony — they meet its gorgeous curator, Helen Mason (Carole Landis). Tony invokes the cash vs. art dialectic that’s a core principle of bourgeois comedy by asking right off the bat what it could be sold for. Though informed, much to Lucky’s discomfort, that it’s worth little since the paintings are mainly on consignment, Tony remains “interested.” Not in the gallery (or art), but in the beautiful, classy curator. He’s always “interested in the finer things.” Not much unexpected in this overture. (I especially like Romero’s and Berle’s interplay in this scene.)
While Tony and Helen are getting together over lunch, Lucky — now more elegantly attired but still chewing gum — receives two visits. First, a mysterious high-class socialite dame in mink, Claire Barrington (Rose Hobart), appears with a story. Her family is in financial straits and needs to sell a Rembrandt. Would the gallery buy it? Needless to say, Lucky has no ideas what a Rembrandt is. She leaves her card, just in case. Next arrives “The Genius” (Elisha Cook, Jr.), a “native” modernist starving artist who first rails at Lucky for fostering only dead art, then soliciting him to be his patron. Cook had a long career as a railing noncomformist in an slew of interesting films (most famously, but untypically, as Wilmer in Huston’s The Maltese Falcon). So, now added to the cash/art dialectic comes the original/traditional dialectic. Youthful American energy vs. snobby European stuffiness — though most of the paintings that The Genius delivers to Lucky are parodistic imitations of European modernists except for his explanations: e.g., “The Inferno, or Coney Island on the Fourth of July.” The dialogue prefigures sitcoms to come, but here it’s fully integrated with a bigger theme that cuts across all the levels: what’s inherently interesting vs. what’s a historical fetish?
Over lunch, Tony and Helen begin their overlap of understanding. He understands nothing about art — who the fuck is this El Greco guy? — while Helen admits, having sussed that he’s a bookie, her parallel ignorance about the world of horses. They both go professional (a light invocation of what Bergson calls the comedy of “professional jargon”). But Tony reveals something. He never bets until he knows the whole deal: “the boy, the outfit, and the oval.” A throwaway line, one would think. But, translated into hoity-toity, that’s exactly how he thinks he’ll approach the “art market” — crapping out on all counts. In the next scene, as Helen takes Tony on a visit to The Art Museum, Tony witnesses a painter doing his reproductive due diligence in copying a work by an Old Master. At this point, it’s just Tony getting educated. He’ll get a lot more educated about such things later.
Tony decides the Rembrandt offer should be pursued. He and Lucky visit the Barrington pile to check out the scene and the offer. So impressed by the Barringtons’ distress, they make the deal — only to discover on examination that the Rembrandt is a fake. They’ve been conned by more accomplished cons, high-art cons. As the increasingly complicated plot develops — two devious comic plans intersecting with a sincere one –, the already established comic dialectics — cash/art, street/elite, original/handed-down — reinforce each other. But a new, bigger one emerges that overarches them, a primal comic problem: fake vs. authentic.
Tony and Lucky return to the Barrington house to recover their outlay for the fake Rembrandt, and happen upon Claire’s supposed uncle, Gigi (J. Carroll Nash), copying yet another Rembrandt. The scales fall from their eyes and Tony is as morally outraged as if he were a proper bourgeois. Nash as Gigi steals the show. As a master art-forger, he’s set in comic contrast with The Genius — Gigi has riches from his counterfeits, while The Genius is glad to get ten bucks for his originals. But the contrast isn’t entirely what it seems. Gigi considers himself a genius, that his fakes improve on the originals — and his many copies hanging in leading art galleries back him up. The Genius’s “originals,” meanwhile, are pretty obviously imitations of European modernists, an in-joke if there ever was one.
Gigi’s compulsion to improve on the Masters is the funniest thread in the script — the fakery of his Rembrandt is discovered because he just had to add a frill. Literally. An extra frill on a Rembrandt collar. The seed of the Phase 2 plot has been planted: Gigi is indeed a genius, a comic Van Meegeren, and could be a golden goose. (Fwiw, Van Meegeren, the most famous of modern art forgers, wasn’t exposed until after World War II.) But the other part of his genius, the need to put his own mark on the impeccable phonies could — and indeed has — led to their discovery.
Meanwhile, the whole shebang is getting a makeover. The gallery is being recapitalized, renovated, and repainted. Tony has become a sweetheart. And The Genius unexpectedly sells a painting to the New York Times art critic — which means Lucky has become a bona fide art patron for a mere twenty dollar outlay. Helen and Tony hunker down to placid bliss — which involves Tony heroically resisting boredom as Helen reads him art history before a comforting hearth. Until he hears something that gets right through to him.
Perking up at the sound of “a missing Velasquez” and Helen’s explanation of lost masterworks, Tony immediately comes up with an angle. He’ll “find” the missing painting — and commissions Gigi to paint it (unbeknownst to Helen, of course). The fake passes an examination by the house-expert Appleby (Charles Pierlot) with flying colors. They’ll auction it off at the gallery — “the art event of the year.” The authentic/fake dialectic continues to unfold — the phony Velasquez has created a palimpsest: the original was painted by the genius Master, while the fake is so like the original that its painter is also a genius. Just of another kind. So it appears that our comedy will revolve around an illustrious lack and its supplement, the absent Velasquez and the present simulacrum, which passes completely for the real thing.
Helen is in seventh heaven. Tony has saved her gallery, and with consummate gallantry. The ensuing love scene between Landis and Romero is memorable. It is, I believe, the only full-fledged, unironic romantic scene that Romero was ever afforded. It’s beautifully shot in classic form by Fox ace Charles Clarke. (An interesting side-note is that Clarke, an accomplished old-school cinematographer, was a principal in a then-ongoing debate about the increasing use of deep-focus photography. Recall that Citizen Kane was released a year earlier. Clarke wrote that deep-focus tended to confuse the audience’s awareness, distracting them from the narrative, which the camera should always serve. Following Clarke’s logic, this would be an especially big problem with comedy — and when Greg Toland used deep-focus for Howard Hawks’s Ball of Fire in the previous year, a number of critics did complain that it made the sets more Gothic than comic.) In any case, though the film was made on Fox’s B-lot, Clarke gave Landis and Romero the A-list romantic velvet. I’m not sure whether Romero ever again was offered such luster.
Things have been going too smoothly, so who should appear but Helen’s former co-worker and beau, Stewart (Richard Derr), back from his mission in Europe, where Tony deftly funded him to find paintings for the gallery. He has exciting news. He has brought with him a Spanish nobleman, Don Fernando (Steven Geray), who has in his possession none other than the lost Velasquez. And he’s willing to sell. Consternation. The brilliant final flurry begins. The buyer of Gigi’s at-auction fake, a government employee as it happens, who had been strategically bidden up by Tony and Lucky at the auction, naturally insists on bringing in his own appraiser to verify the painting’s authenticity. Tony has to act fast. He needs to replace Gigi’s fake Velasquez with the Don’s “authentic” one. At first, Tony and Lucky try intimidation on the Don, but ultimately have to offer a hundred thousand bucks to buy the Don’s “authentic” one to replace Gigi’s phony (which of course has already passed muster, but has since been replaced by the realer thing — supposedly). All this without letting Helen, Stewart, or Appleby realize the switch. The dialogue is excellent in these scenes as each character contributes their own double-meanings. Tony’s and Lucky’s intentional and ironic, the others’ out of ignorance.
What could go wrong? The government buyer’s appraiser determines that the “authentic” Velasquez bought from the Don is a fake, and a pretty obvious one. It looks like Tony and Lucky are going to be nailed for a fraud they didn’t commit, and moreover they’re out a hundred grand. Schlimazel time. Helen is flabbergasted and demands a second opinion. The Fed buyer agrees. To the rescue comes Gigi, who’s overheard the whole brouhaha. He secretly replaces the Don’s fake with his own. What could prove his genius, of which he has no doubt at all, better than to fool the federal experts? And behold the zany resolution. The feds’ appraiser verifies Gigi’s fake’s authenticity, so the sale can go through after all. It looks like everybody is a winner. The gallery gets the sale. Helen is grateful to Tony for his ministrations. Gigi’s genius is affirmed. Even Stewart is content, getting credit for the painting that he still thinks is the one he procured from Don Fernando.
Bergson thought that comedies are usually structured like children’s games and toys. He mentions several — the jack-in-the-box, tag, marionettes — but not all. A Gentleman at Heart is structured on one he left out: the shell game. The painting appears and disappears, is verified as authentic then mysteriously de-verified, kept secret, exposed, then secreted again. The painting is the object of the phallus game, a true comic fetish — an “authentic” one, since the real Velasquez is always absent, continually supplemented by imaginary ones. But who wins the game, then? No one but Gigi. He alone knows which painting is which, and he alone knows that in the phallus game the most artful pretense is what gets you the win. And in the end, Tony donates the (fake) painting to the government, a gift that he can use to deduct from his (real) taxes. Art (one could say fake art, but the art auction demonstrates that commerce makes even authentic art into a fake) defeats reality (taxes, that is).
In the clever conclusion, the schlimazeling is undone. Tony gifts Helen the gallery, while she, where she appeared to be returning to Stewart’s arms, returns to Tony at his “gallery,” the racetrack at Santa Anita. All that angling seems to have worked, except for the hundred grand that Lucky paid Don Fernando — until Lucky shows that the proper trickster order was never out of whack. The hundred g’s paid to the Don were counterfeit. The real stuff was in Lucky’s pocket all along.
Landis’s biographer, Eric Lawrence Gans, writes that A Gentleman at Heart was originally conceived as a major prestige project, to be filmed in Italy, with Tyrone Power, Henry Fonda, Loretta Young, and Don Ameche considered for the leading roles at various times. The move to Fox’s B-lot was surely conceived to be a come-down. Still, I’m glad it worked out that way (if only to save us from another prissy Tyrone-Loretta straitjacket). Only by the 40s’ standards could the final product be considered a B movie. The script by Lee Loeb and Harold Buchman, adapted from a story by Paul Hervey Fox, is every bit as good as the one for Tall, Dark and Handsome, which received an Oscar nomination. Even more interesting from a meta-perspective is the film’s maguffin, the missing Velasquez. Arguably, all comic maguffins go missing, which is another way of saying they are comic fetishes. The Velasquez is a bit like the missing “dingus” in The Maltese Falcon; to my mind more clever. I haven’t been able to track down the script’s original story, “Masterpiece,” but it’s a safe bet that the author chose a Velasquez precisely because there has been so much intrigue in art history about missing Velasquez canvases. Some of the mysteries are still topical today. There’s the enigma of the maniacal 19th century English bookseller who lost everything to prove that he possessed a lost painting by the Master; and no one knows where that painting is now. A recent book tells the tale (good capsule description of it here). And quite recently a supposedly authentic Velasquez has “disappeared,” possibly spirited away by its owners for nefarious reasons. (There’s a story about that one here.) For a satirical comedy about the art world, a more “meta” maguffin couldn’t have been found.