That Lonelyhearts column again

Back in the studio era, it wasn't uncommon for studios to remake their B movies. After all, the previous versions weren't really showing up anywhere to remind people of them, and it was a budget saver on the screenplay. Paul Muni's Hi, Nellie! was remade three times within about 15 years. The third of four versions of the movie is titled You Can't Escape Forever and aired on TCM back when George Brent was Star of the Month.

Brent plays Steve Mitchell, editor of a big-city paper whose girlfriend Laurie (Brenda Marshall) is trying to make it as a reporter. However, she has issues like fainting when she covers an execution only to discover too late that the condemned man was pardoned. For this, she gets demoted to the "advice to the lovelorn" column. Meanwhile, the condemned man was believed to be working for Greer (Eduardo Ciannelli), the local crime boss, since this was an era where all of the crime was managed by gangsters, or so it seemed if you watched the movies.

A man named Crowder shows up at the newspaper having written a manuscript by hand that he claims will blow the roof off of the Greer gang. Not long after, Crowder dies in what is an accident to everybody but Steve. So Steve publishes a headling claiming it wasn't an accident, only for the autopsy to say otherwise. So this time it's Steve who gets demoted to the lonelyhearts column.

Thankfully, there's a singles' club in town meaning there's ample work for a romance columnist. But there's something odd about this place and the weddings it performs, so Steve decides to investigate, figuring he can use this as a way to get out of the newspaper building and try to get the evidence that will prove he was right all along about Crowder's death. And, as it turns out, Crowder met his wife at the club, and wasn't the first person to get married at the club and die under mysterious circumstances.

Steve and his photographer Mac (Roscoe Karns) go to the club with Laurie following along, and she sees that the club is indeed a "respectable" front for a criminal organization, and probably laundering money to boot. Furthermore, the owner of the club, Robelink (Gene Lockhart) is the brother-in-law of Greer. Robelink, for his part, got the manuscript that Crowder wrote, but he's not planning to tell anybody where it is if he can avoid doing so.

You can probably guess how all of this is going to go, which is that Greer figures out Robelink may crack and that Steve is a threat. But this is the sort of movie that's going to have a happy ending. Crime does not pay, especially during the Production Code era.

I think now I've seen all four versions of this movie. I think my favorite is Love Is on the Air, which moves the story to radio and benefits from the presence of Ronald Reagan who was well-fit to Warner Bros.' B movies. In You Can't Escape Forever, Brent comes across as a bit of a conman and mildly unsympathetic, while Roscoe Karns is obnxiously incompetent at times. But this was B material, and released in the midst of World War II when audiences wanted escapism. You'll definitely escape here.

East of the River

I have a bit less that I've watched saved up to do posts on, only because I recorded a few things I planned to do posts on, only to start them and realized not only had I seen the movie, I'd already done a post on it. With that in mind, I looked through the films on my DVR and selected East of the River, which didn't seem familiar to me, at least not in the sense of realizing I'd seen it before. There are other ways in which it is familiar, of course....

The movie starts off in the late 1920s in New York. Mama Lorenzo (Marjorie Rambeau) is an Italian-American in New York who runs a pasta restaurant and has an adolescent son Joe who's always getting into some sort of trouble or another. This time, however, he's gone too far, and is threatened by the judge (Moroni Olsen in one of his many character actor roles) with being sent to reform school. Mama has an impassioned talk with the judge, who decides to give Joe one more chance. However, Joe got in trouble along with an orphan Nick, who is going to be sent not back to the orphanage, but to that reform school since he doesn't have a family to go home to. So Mama offers to adopt Nick and the judge amazingly enough agrees.

A montage shows that the two boys grow up, with Nick being grateful for his second chance in life, getting straight A's, and going on to college. Joe, for his part, continues his bad ways, eventually getting thrown out of school and heading west to California at 18, where he can continue a life of crime without his mother finding out about it. He's using the proceeds of his crime to help pay his brother's way through college, of course. (Warner Bros. had used this plot device in Invisible Stripes only a year before.

The law catches up with Joe (played as an adult by John Garfield), and he spends a fair bit of time in San Quentin. But he lies to Mama and Nick about where he is, instead getting his girlfriend Laurie (Brenda Marshall) to commit forgery for him so that he can keep sending money home. Eventually, Joe gets out, and just in time, as he's learned that Nick (played as an adult by William Lundigan) is about to graduate from college. So he and Laurie head to New York for the graduation.

Not that Joe is able to escape his life of crime. And he's in trouble, because the two guys who framed him are in New York. Joe is able to turn the tables on them, but this means he's a wanted man by them so he has to head back to California to lay low for a while, telling Mama he has to attend to the "honest" business he left behind. Joe makes the mistake of leaving Laurie behind, and as time passes, Laurie begins to fall in love with Nick, and ultimately decides to marry Nick. Joe finds out, and he's jealous. And a vindictive bastard. He threatens to reveal Laurie's criminal past to Mama (who loves Laurie like the daughter Mama never had) and scupper the wedding between Laurie and Nick if Laurie won't do Joe's bidding.

I've mentioned before that going back to the pre-Code days, Warner Bros. was the studio that was best at doing social issue pictures. East of the River isn't quite that, but it certainly fits into the mold of the lower-class urban drama and crime movies that those social issue pictures evolved into by the end of the 1930s. Of course, in James Cagey, then Humphrey Bogart, and now John Garfield, they had the stars to pull it off more than some of the other studios did.

At the same time, however, it feels like there's no new ground being broken in East of the River, and a sort of sense that this is a movie being made because Warner Bros. needed something to go on the lower half of the bill. There's not exactly anything terribly wrong with it, mind you, other than a decided lack of originality. It's the sort of thing that, a generation later, probably would have been pared down from 74 to 44 minutes and turned into a TV episode for some show.

East of the River isn't the best work of any of the cast members, but I don't think it's anything any of them should be ashamed of, either.