Big City Blues

It's been a while since I blogged about a pre-Code film. With that in mind, I fired up the DVR to watch the entertaining if imperfect Big City Blues.

Eric Linden plays Bud Reeves, who at the start of the movie is racing to catch the train from his home town of Hoopersville, IN, to go to New York City and make it big there. He was to wait for the next train out of town long enough to have a good talk with the station agent (Grant Mitchell), who himself had gone off to make a fortune in the big city 25-plus years earlier and came back, having done a bunch of different jobs and never making it big. Bud swears things are going to be different, but with a title like Big City Blues, one wonders whether that will be the case.

Bud has a cousin in New York named Gibby (Walter Catless), who frankly seems like the sort of schmoozer everybody ought to be able to see right through. For some reason, however, Bud doesn't see through him, and Gibby starts using Bud's $1100 bankroll to try to set both of them up. Gibby claims to know everybody who matters, but that is of course a load of hogwash, with all he really knows being some bootleggers and some second-rate chorus girls.

Among those chorus girls is Vida Fleet (Joan Blondell), whom Bud first meets in the lobby of the hotel where he's going to be staying. (Doesn't cousin Gibby have an apartment?) Vida has lived in New York for several years, but it turns out she too is from a small town, that being Oneida, NY. As such she understands Bud better than anybody else and even has a lot of sympathy for him, which Gibby clearly doesn't. Bud, for his part immediately falls in love with Vida and is lucky she isn't looking to exploit him.

Gibby wants to introduce Bud to more people, so he organizes a party which will be held in Bud's room. There's bootleg liquor there and a bunch of chorus girls and guys of ill repute there. (Humphrey Bogart is there, uncredited, in an early role as Shep, with his unmistakable voice.) Things get out of hand and punches are thrown, before somebody breaks a bottle of bathtub gin to throw and that kills one of the chorus girls. Everybody beats a hasty escape, with Gibby not bothering to help Bud.

Everybody who was in that room (well, except for the dead girl) is now a fugitive from justice, but Bud is the biggest one. He realizes he can't escape by bus or train, and so he goes lookin for Vida, who still has sympathy for him. Of course, the police eventually find everybody in that room, while hotel detective Hummell (Guy Kibbee) is also trying to solve the case.

Big City Blues is one of those movies that packs a lot into its brief running time of just over 60 minutes. With so many recognizable names as well as Warner Bros.' penchant for making punchy movies, it's unsurprising that the movie is elevated from being strictly a B movie. I shudder to think, for example, of what MGM would have done with the material.

That's not to say the movie is without its flaws. I mentioned early on that Gibby is so obnoxious that I couldn't imagine how anybody would be bamboozled by him, and that's what drives the movie's plot. Everything happening lickety-split also moves the film, even if that too is highly unrealistic. But overall, Big City Blues is definitely worth a watch.

Big City Blues got a DVD release on one of the Forbidden Hollywood sets.