Double Dynamite

Tomorrow, December 10, is not the birth anniversary of writer/diretor Melville Shavelson. However, TCM is spending the morning and afternoon with his work, starting with Double Dynamite at 6:30 AM.

Frank Sinatra plays Johnny Dalton, a bank teller at a southern California bank in an era when bank tellers were supposedly more prestigious than they are today. I say "supposedly" because in this case Johnny isn't paid as though the job had any prestige. He's got a co-worker Mildred (Jane Russell) who's also his girlfriend, and whom he'd like to marry. The problem is that neither of them earns very much, with a secondary problem of Johnny being too timid. The best he can do is take Mildred to lunch at the Italian restaurant next to the bank. Working at the restaurant as a waiter is Emile Keck (Groucho Marx). When Emile hears about Johnny's problems, he suggests that Johnny needs to live dangerously and do something daring.

And wouldn't you know it, but on the way back from lunch, Johnny has just that opportunity. There's a mugging going on, and Johnny saves the victim from the two assailants. It turns out that the victim is Hot Horse Harris (Nestor Paiva), a well-known bookie who repays Johnny's kindness by taking him to the betting parlor in back of a shirt shop and gives Johnny $1,000. But there's a catch. Johnny is supposed to place a bet on one of the horses. With Hot Horse's help, Johnny has multiple bets pay off, winning something like $60,000. In theory, Johnny can use this money to buy Mildred some of the finer things she's want in life, and even marry her, since this amounts to several years' income.

At this point, the natural question from Mildred would be to inquire about the source of the income, since gambling by the tellers is something that's frowned upon. They're supposed to have probity. Worse is that when Johnny returns to the bank, it's to the news that something has gone wrong and the bank is short $75,000. The bank manager and president understandably assume somebody is embezzling, which would make Johnny's story about suddenly having saved a professional gambler and making money on hot horse tips something nobody's going to believe. Especially when it turns out that the betting parlor was a pop-up place that's moved locations to evade the police.

How is Johnny going to get out of this? Well, he enlists the help of Emile, who sees this in part as a chance to live high on the hog for a while. But Emile's schemes don't seem to work at all and only implicate Johnny further. Things go from bad to worse, and even Mildred is caught in the web of suspicion: Johnny had bought her a fur for a Christmas present, and the bankers see the tag. But of course both Johnny and Mildred are innocent, and with the Production Code, that innocence is going to have to be borne out in the end.

Double Dynamite was made at RKO in 1948, but held up for release until 1951. Having finally seen it, I can understand why. Sadly, it's not particularly good, being more madcap than anything else and a plot that's just too darn far-fetched for its own good. It's hard to understand why Johnny would go back to Emile for advice, or how somebody like Emile wound up as a waiter in a hole-in-the-wall Italian restaurant in the first place. However, I can also understand better now just why Frank Sinatra was so desperate to get the role of Maggio in From Here to Eternity. Movies like Double Dynamite were a sign of his flagging movie career, which he seriously wanted to revive. Of course, we know now that he did get the part and would go on to win an Oscar for it. But Double Dynamite had nothing to do with that.