The Mayor of 44th Street

I mentioned some time back that I somehow wound up with several movies on my DVR which all star George Murphy. So I've been watching them and writing up these posts to save in draft and then schedule them after a suitable break between them. This time, the movie that I watched is another RKO programmer, The Mayor of 44th Street.

Murphy plays Joe Jonathan, a booking agent who works with a whole bunch of musical acts (which conveniently is also a way for the movie to pad things out) serving the sort of nightclub that started going out of style in the years after World War II and espeically once television came along. It's the sort of business that's ripe for having the Mob try to push in and force people to book specific acts or pay protection money to keep the Mob away.

One such gangster is Bits McKarg (Rex Downing) who, it turns out, is actually just a teenager leading a whole bunch of teens who basically heckle the sort of bands that they don't like, although they're really no more harmful than the Dead End Kids were, whether it was in the Dead End Kids days or even when they became the Bowery Boys. But Bits looked up to the movie gangsters of the 30s, and wants to be a tough guy, and his gang of youths is going to be useful later in the movie.

The more important gangster is Ed Kirby (Richard Barthelmess in his final role before retiring). Ed and Joe had a past together, but Kirby got sent up to prison some years back. Cop Tommy Fallon (William Gargan) shows up at Joe's office one day to tell him that Ed is applying for parole. This is something that troubles Joe, but even more so troubles his long-suffering girlfriend and dance partner Jessey (Anne Shirley). The obvious fear is that Kirby, if he gets out of prison, is going to come back to Joe and cause a whole world of trouble.

Sure enough, Kirby gets out of prison and goes looking for Joe. Worse for Joe is that he's made what could be seen as a mistake in taking on Bits as a sort of young man to mentor. Better to teach Bits how to do things honestly and make a good living than have Bits stay the way he was. Kirby is going to need a job to satisfy his parole officer, and the only person who can give him that chance, at least according to Kirby's lawyers, is Joe. (Can't Kirby work as a secretary to the lawyers?) Joe is dumb enough to give Kirby another chance.

It's not too hard to guess what happens next, which is that Kirby goes back to his old ways of trying to shake down everybody he sees, even though this isn't what Joe wants at all. And with Bits still looking up to gangsters like Kirby, it's going to be hard for Joe to resist the pressure, at least not without getting the crap knocked out of him.

George Murphy isn't the world's greatest actor, largely because he doesn't exactly have a ton of charisma. He's nominally the lead here, but it's more of an ensemble of second-tier stars, who more or less work well together. Nobody's going to mistake The Mayor of 44th Street for a prestige picture, but it's another of those films that works for what it does and entertained the people as the bottom of the bill back in the early days of World War II.