Barbary Coast

A few months back, I was looking through some of the offerings on Tubi, and saw an old movie I don't think I'd heard of, one with some pretty big stars in it: Howard Hawks' 1935 version of Barbary Coast. I finally got around to watching it, and it's one that doesn't have any indication of being about to expire.

Miriam Hopkins is the star here, playing Mary Rutledge. But before we meet her, we get a prologue informing us of how gold was discovered in California in 1848 and how that brought a ton of men to what the US had recently gained in the war against Mexico, and would soon become a state. Following those men is Mary, who is about to get off the boat in San Francisco in order to meet again with her fiancé, Dan Morgan. Unfortunately, she's informed by the denizens of San Francisco that Mr. Morgan is quite dead.

Taking Mary under his wing is Louis Chamalis (Edward G. Robinson). Now, if Barbary Coast were a pre-Code, Mary would have been his mistress, but the movie was released in 1935, when such a relationship couldn't be depicted. Louis runs one of the local gaming houses, and is a pretty big cheese in Frisco. So while Louis takes Mary on and gives her room and board, and presumably expects to start a romantic relationship with her, he also gives her a job as a croupier.

Of course, the roulette wheels are crooked, as that's just one way Louis makes his money and keeps it. There's not much real law here yet, so Louis has a bunch of henchmen led by Knuckles (Brian Donlevy) to mete out force so Louis can keep what's his, and he intends to get a bunch of that gold for himself without having to mine it. A lot of people are unhappy with this arrangement -- Dan Morgan would have been one such man, but he's dead now. One of Mary's fellow passengers, Col. Cobb, is also unimpressed, so he buys a printing press and vows to start a muckracking newspaper. Louis, unsurprisingly, threatens him.

That finally pushes Mary over the line, and she decides to go out by herself for a horseback ride just to get away for a day and clear her head. But the weather isn't good and, San Francisco not being a big city yet, Mary gets lost. She finds what she thinks is an abandoned cabin, except that it's being used by prospector Jim Carmichael (Joel McCrea). He lets her come in and dry off, and as this happens you know he and Mary are going to fall in love. Jim has finally hit gold, and is planning to head back to New York.

But in San Francisco while waiting for the boat, he learns what Mary does for a living, and this makes the two hate each other for some reason. Mary takes all of Jim's money at the roulette wheel, while Col. Cobb decides to start on a campaign of vigilante justice to get at Louis. Mary and Jim eventually get caught in all this, and it threatens to end tragically for the two of them.

Except, of course, that Barbary Coast was released in 1935. Had it been a pre-Code, you might possibly get at least an ambiguous ending. But because of the Code, you know that Louis is going to get what he deserves for his crimes, while Mary is going to find a way to expiate her sins.

Barbary Coast is another of those movies where the big problem I have with it is the fact that the Code forces a certain ending on them. Having read a bit more about the movie, it was based on a novel with a plot that, if not entirely different, at least is able to handle things with a much more grown-up sensibility. Joe Breen and friends were apparently thoroughly displeased, and forced all sorts of script changes, which are decidedly not to the movie's benefit, which is a huge shame given the cast.

Still, that does make Barbary Coast the sort of movie you should watch to see how the Production Code could hurt a Hollywood movie.