Justice is Served

Now this is the sort of film title I’d like to see in an era where the rich are getting richer, the middle class is eroding and the poor are becoming a majority. But Millionaires in Prison (1940) is not in the muck-racking tradition of Inside Job (2010) or Capitalism: A Love Story (2009) or Enron: The Smartest Guys In the Room (2005). Instead, it’s a 1940 grade-B programmer from RKO which serves up two terrific premises but doesn’t quite deliver on either in the expected way. Still, it’s rather astonishing that the filmmakers were able to shoehorn two ambitious storylines along with a romantic subplot (two of the convict protagonists have girlfriends on the outside) into a 65-minute movie.   Continue reading

Lee Tracy Does Washington

Whenever a repertory cinema like NYC’s Film Forum or a film archive like the George Eastman Museum programs a Pre-Code series you can bet that Lee Tracy is bound to be in a few of the famous titles such as The Strange Love of Molly Louvain, Love is a Racket, Doctor X, Blessed Event (all released in 1932) and Bombshell (1933). He’s also likely to be playing some kind of shady careerist such as a carnival barker, ambulance-chasing lawyer or tabloid newsman. That’s probably due to his legendary performance on Broadway in 1928 as reporter Hildy Johnson in The Front Page, written by Charles MacArthur and Ben Hecht. Unfortunately, he didn’t get to play the role in the 1931 screen version – Pat O’Brien won that honor and Rosalind Russell played the female version in Howard Hawks’ 1940 remake, His Girl Friday – but Fox Pictures realized Tracy’s potential and brought him to Hollywood in 1929.  Continue reading