Simpson Sundays: Mmm…Grapefruit

Season 4, Episode 14: Brother From the Same Planet

In this episode, Bart gets mad at Homer and decides to get revenge by pretending that he has no father and signing up for a Big Brothers program. When Homer realizes what Bart’s done, he decides to get back at Bart by signing up to be a Big Brother to a young, underprivileged boy named Pepi. While talking to Pepi, Homer describes an exaggerated tale of the way Bart treated him:

Homer: “Son, I want you to know I love you very much.”

Bart: “Shut up!”

Homer: “Mmm…grapefruit.”

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It’s about time I finally started a new feature on here! Come back every Sunday for another classic film reference or parody from The Simpsons.

Turn Back the Clock (1933)

Joe Gimlet (Lee Tracy) is a middle-aged man who runs a store with his wife Mary (Mae Clarke). Times are tough and they’re barely eking out a living when one day, their old friend Ted Wright (Otto Kruger) comes into the shop and they agree to get together. Ted has been faring a bit better than Joe and Mary; he went on to become a very successful bank president and is married to Elvina (Peggy Shannon), another old friend of theirs. They agree to get together and spend an evening together.

Growing up, Ted was infatuated with Mary and Joe is still kicking himself for turning down a business proposition from Elvina’s father when he was younger that would have made him a millionaire. Despite everything he has, Ted admits to being jealous of everything Joe and Mary have and offers Joe the chance to get in on an investment. Joe really wants to take him up on the investment opportunity, but it would wipe out their savings and Mary doesn’t think it’s a good idea. She and Joe get into a big argument about it that night and Joe gets very drunk, leaves the house, and gets hit by a car.

Joe is taken to a hospital where he’s put under ether and dreams that he’s a young man once again. Now he has a chance to undo all the mistakes he made so many years ago. Not only does he take Elvina’s father up on that business offer, he marries her and uses his knowledge of the future to make some very wise investments and ends up being offered a very important consultant position with the government regarding World War I. Mary, on the other hand, married Ted and the two of them live a modest life running a shop together. But there’s the age-old question of whether or not money truly makes a person happier.

Movies about a person having a fantasy about either going back in time, into the future are hardly, or otherwise experiencing an alternate reality are hardly anything unique, but Turn Back the Clock somehow manages to not feel clichéd. I can’t quite put my finger on what prevents it from feeling trite, but it manages to pull it off. It may be because it does have a touch of sentimentality to it, but not in a heavy-handed way. It’s a slow build to Joe’s epiphany that maybe wealth and power isn’t quite what it’s cracked up to be and never heads into being overly dramatic. The cast is great, it’s a particularly great Lee Tracy vehicle. It’s certainly interesting to see them try to make young Mae Clarke into a drab middle-aged woman. And hey, it’s even got a special guest appearance by the Three Stooges as an added bonus. All in all, I’d say it’s a movie that deserves to be a bit more well-known than it currently seems to be.

Pre-Code Essentials: The Public Enemy (1931)

Plot

Even from a young age, it was abundantly clear that Tom Powers (James Cageny) wasn’t on the path to being a law-abiding citizen. Along with his best friend Matt Doyle (Edward Woods), they grow from being young punks to real gangsters under the guidance of “Putty Nose” (Murray Kinnell). But when Putty Nose betrays Tom and Matt, they get in close with “Nails” Nathan (Leslie Fenton) and move into the bootlegging syndicate. Meanwhile, Tom’s brother Mike (Donald Cook) has taken a completely different path in life. While his brother is getting rich by breaking the law, Mike enlists in the military to serve in WWI and works hard to earn an honest living when he returns. Mike deeply resents how his brother is getting rich by breaking the law while he tries so hard to lead an honest life and gets nothing in return.

Tom and Matt become quite well known in the criminal underworld and Tom is particularly ruthless. Given the opportunity, he kills his old mentor Putty Nose. Tom is also awful to the women in his life. When he gets tired of seeing Kitty (Mae Clarke), he ends it by shoving a grapefruit in her face and starts taking up with Gwen (Jean Harlow) instead. After Nails Nathan dies in an accident, Tom gets even more aggressive and gets involved in a nasty mob war that ends up being his downfall.

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My Thoughts

Not only is The Public Enemy one of my favorite pre-codes, it’s one of my favorite movies in general. When I saw it for the first time, I wasn’t terribly interested in gangster movies, but I picked up a copy of it because I’d heard it was good and because I like Jean Harlow. The Public Enemy isn’t Jean Harlow’s finest moment, but this is the movie that made me a fan of the gangster genre. With Cagney’s tour de force performance, its well-written script, and fast pace, how could I not be pulled in by it? The Public Enemy is a prime example of why I adore the early 1930s style of film making so much. It clocks in at just 83 minutes, but has a very complex, layered story that is fast paced, but never feels rushed. There’s a very fine line between “fast paced” and “rushed,” but The Public Enemy walks that line flawlessly. And then there’s Cagney. I just can’t say enough about how much I adore his performance as Tom Powers.

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The Definitive Pre-Code Moments

Tom’s gay tailor.

Tom’s derogatory behavior towards women, most infamously when Mae Clarke gets the grapefruit in the face.

All of Tom’s criminal activities.

Tom being raped by Paddy Ryan’s girlfriend:

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Why It’s an Essential Pre-Code

You know a movie is tough when they have to add an introduction explaining that the movie you’re about to see isn’t meant to glorify this behavior. Gangster movies had their first real golden age during the pre-code era. Not only was there The Public Enemy, there was also Little Caesar and Scarface. There were certainly gangster movies that came after the production codes were being enforced, but the pre-code era allowed them to be more violent and be a bit more ruthless and sinister. A lot of the more violent scenes were edited out when The Public Enemy was re-released under the influence of the production codes.

In one noteworthy scene, Tom goes to a tailor to be measured for a suit and the tailor is meant to be a flamboyantly gay man. When the movie was re-released, the bit where the tailor comments on Tom’s arm muscles ended up on the cutting room floor along with some of the movie’s more violent moments.

Pre-Code Essentials: Frankenstein (1931)

Plot

Young scientist Henry Frankenstein (Colin Clive) thinks he has stumbled unto the secret for bringing the dead back to life. At night, he and his assistant Fritz (Dwight Frye) toil away in an abandoned, secluded building and stealing corpses to experiment on. Frankenstein’s fiancée Elizabeth (Mae Clarke) becomes concerned about his strange behavior and arrives at his secret laboratory just in time to see him successfully bring the Creature (Boris Karloff) to life. It isn’t long before Frankenstein decides the Creature could be potentially dangerous and must be destroyed.

Before he is completely certain the Creature has been killed, Frankenstein leaves to get ready for his wedding. The Creature kills Frankenstein’s assistant and escapes, finding his way to a nearby town. He meets a young girl, Maria (Marilyn Harris), who invites him to float flowers in the lake with her. When he runs out of flowers, he throws Maria in the water, thinking she will float too. When she doesn’t float, the horrified Creature runs away to the house where the wedding is to take place, frightens Elizabeth, and escapes again. When the villagers find out what has happened to Maria, they band together with torches to hunt the monster down. Dr. Frankenstein joins the mob and when the Creature finds him, he drags Frankenstein to an abandoned windmill. The villagers corner him there and burn the windmill down.

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My Thoughts

Frankenstein is my personal favorite of the Universal horror films. It’s an extremely intelligent horror film and it’s interesting to see a horror movie that leaves you sympathizing with the Creature. I really don’t like referring to the Creature as a monster because Dr. Frankenstein is the real monster here. The Creature never asked to be brought back to life, he doesn’t understand what’s going on, and all he can do is react in very primal, visceral ways and nobody around him understands that.

Boris Karloff is absolutely genius as the Creature. Although Frankenstein is not a silent film, Karloff’s performance is a testament to how much an actor can do without actually saying anything. When you take a performance as brilliant as Karloff’s and combine it with that unforgettable makeup by Jack Pierce, you get a truly unforgettable character. The story of Frankenstein has been adapted for the screen many times over the years, but Karloff remains the most famous actor to play the Creature for a very good reason.

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The Definitive Pre-Code Moment

After the creature is first brought to life, Dr. Frankenstein declares, “It’s alive! It’s alive! In the name of God! Now I know what it feels like to be God!”

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Why It’s an Essential Pre-Code

Compared to some other movies turned out during the glorious pre-code era, Frankenstein might seem pretty tame in comparison. Sure, it lacks the gratuitous undressing, gangsters, and innuendo that other pre-codes have in spades, but it’s an excellent example of another big part of the production code: issues surrounding religion. Many censors objected to anything that portrayed religious leaders in an unflattering light (The Miracle Woman and Rain are prime examples of that) or anything that could be seen as blasphemous. Dr. Frankenstein’s desire to play God most certainly fell into the “blasphemous” category, specifically his line about knowing what it feels like to be God. This line was edited out when Frankenstein was re-released after the production codes were being enforced and wasn’t fully restored until several decades later. Note how the concept of playing God is quite explicitly condemned in 1935’s Bride of Frankenstein.

Censors also took issue with the scene where the Creature throws the little girl into the water. Many people thought this scene was too violent and gruesome and cut the part where we see the Creature actually throwing the girl into the water. Personally, I think actually seeing the Creature throw the girl into the water is way less disturbing than to leave it showing the Creature reaching for the girl and letting the imagination run wild.

The Front Page (1931)

Just before Earl Williams (George E. Stone) is to be executed, the big question on many newspaper reporters minds is where isn’t about the execution, but where Hildy Johnson (Pat O’Brien) is.  Hildy is one of the top reporters in Chicago and with the execution being such a big story, it’s odd that Hildy is nowhere to be found.  The truth is, Hildy has had enough of the newspaper world and is ready to leave it behind to marry his girlfriend Peggy (Mary Grant).  He’s happy to stop by the press room at the courthouse to say goodbye to his friends, but the one person he absolutely does not want to see is his editor Walter Burns (Adolphe Menjou).  He knows that if he visits Walter, he’ll get suckered into staying at the paper.

But before Hildy can leave town, Earl Williams escapes.  The reporters in the press room rush to get on the story and Hildy can’t help but be caught up in the excitement and gets to work on the story himself.  After a while, Peggy arrives at the press room, not happy about being pushed aside for the newspaper yet again.  As much as Hildy would like to be with Peggy, he gets the scoop of a lifetime when Williams climbs in through a window of the press room.  Hildy hides Williams from the other reporters and when the other reporters are back in the press room, Williams’ friend Molly (Mae Clarke) distracts them by jumping out a window.

While Hildy works, Walter comes to check on him and of course, he tries to convince Hildy to stay on at the paper.  As the action unfolds, Hildy is left to juggle the big story and his soon-to-be wife.

If the story of The Front Page sounds familiar, that’s probably because it’s best remembered as its remake, 1940’s His Girl Friday.  Although The Front Page is a pretty good movie, it’s one of the rare times where I liked the remake better than the original.  Pat O’Brien and Adolphe Menjou are fine, but I much prefer Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell.  The Front Page is funny and fast paced, but His Girl Friday is full of even faster dialogue and the screwball factor is really amped up.  I really don’t mean to imply that The Front Page isn’t worth watching, but His Girl Friday took everything that was good about The Front Page and ran with it.

The Public Enemy (1931)

Even from a young age, it was pretty clear that Tom Powers (James Cagney) and Matt Doyle (Edward Woods) weren’t on the road to becoming fine, upstanding citizens.  They got their start working for gangster Putty Nose (Murray Kinnell) as children, and when they grew up a bit, he put them to work on bigger jobs.  However, when their first real job goes horribly wrong, Putty Nose leaves them to fend for themselves.  With Putty Nose out of the picture, Tom and Matt get friendly with Nails Nathan (Leslie Fenton) and Paddy Ryan (Robert Emmett O’Connor) and move into the bootlegging racket.

Tom quickly becomes a key player in the local bootlegging ring and starts living the life of a big time gangster.  He’s making lots of money, he gets custom made suits, and rides around town in a nice car.  On the other hand, Tom’s brother Mike (Donald Cook) has taken the more legitimate route in life.  He goes to school, works on a streetcar,  and serves in World War I.  Even though Mike isn’t ashamed of earning an honest living, he has a hard time coping with the fact that he works so hard and barely gets by while his brother is getting rich by breaking the law.  Ma Powers (Beryl Mercer) remains oblivious to how Tom really earns a living and only wants to think the best of her son.

The bootlegging racket continues to be extremely lucrative for Tom and he only becomes more cutthroat and aggressive with time.  When Putty Nose comes back to town, Tom and Matt shoot him.  The women Tom dates aren’t safe, either.  When his girlfriend Kitty (Mae Clarke) gets on his last nerve, he shoves a grapefruit in her face and immediately ditches her for Gwen (Jean Harlow).  Tom’s enemies don’t even have to be human.  After Nails dies from being thrown off his horse, Tom heads on over to the stable and guns down the horse.  So when his best friend Matt is killed by a rival gang, you better believe Tom is out for blood.  But even a big shot like Tom Powers isn’t big enough to take out an entire gang by himself.

Oh, how I love The Public Enemy.  It’s very easily one of my absolute favorite movies.  There’s so much I’d love to say about it that I don’t think I can possibly fit it all in one post.  I could watch it a hundred times and not get tired of it.  Not only do I love the gangster storyline, but I’m also fascinated by the conflict between Tom and his brother.  With two such strong stories going on, The Public Enemy fits more into 83 minutes than a lot of movies do in two hours.

And, of course, I adore James Cagney.  I believe The Public Enemy was the first Cagney movie I ever saw and he instantly became one of my favorite actors.  Originally, Cagney was set to play the part of Matt Doyle and Edward Woods was supposed to be Tom Powers.  But thank goodness director William Wellman realized that Cagney would have hit it out of the park as Tom and had them switch parts.  Cagney’s tour de force performance made him a full-fledged star after only one year of being in movies.

If you ever have the opportunity to see The Public Enemy on the big screen, I very highly recommend going.  When you think of movies that are best seen on the big screen, you probably think of movies like Star Wars or 2001: A Space Odyssey, but believe me, James Cagney was meant to be seen on the big screen.  His screen presence is incredible if you watch him on just a normal-sized television. But when you’re seeing him on a twenty foot tall screen? Every little movement, smirk, and expression is magnified a hundred times and it’s a much more intense experience than it is to watch at home.  This scene in particular is absolutely incredible when you see it in a theater.  I was very pleasantly surprised by how much seeing it on the big screen really added to the whole experience.

Lady Killer (1933)

When Dan Quigley (James Cagney) loses his job as an usher in a movie theater, he turns to running a dice game in a hotel lobby.  While in the hotel one day, he spots the lovely Myra Gale (Mae Clarke) sitting in the lobby and as she gets up to leave, she drops her purse.  Dan follows her to return it, but she leaves before he can.  He drops by her apartment later that day to return it, and she invites him in for a drink and introduces him to her brother-in-law, who is in the middle of a poker game.  Not being able to resist a card game, Dan decides to join the game and he gets taken to the cleaners.  As he leaves the apartment, he meets someone else carrying a purse and looking for Myra.  Dan quickly realizes that Myra’s purse dropping is only a ruse to lure men into a crooked poker game.  Never one to miss a business opportunity, he goes back into the apartment and demands to get in on the action.

With Dan bringing in new people to take advantage of, business is booming.  But then the gang sets their sights on a wealthy widow.  Dan stages a car accident with the woman and arranges it so that he and another member of the gang can get inside her house.  They manage to pull off the robbery, but they start feeling the heat from the police after a butler they knocked unconscious dies.  The gang flees for Los Angeles and Dan is arrested before he even leaves the train station.  When he calls up Myra and asks her to bail him out, she says she’ll help him, but instead she skips town with his money.  The police have to let him go because they don’t have enough evidence to hold him, but they warn him to either get a job in the next 48 hours or get out-of-town.

As luck would have it, Dan is approached by a couple of people in the movie business who offer him some work as an extra.  It turns out he’s a natural in front of the camera, so he gets more and more work in the movies and, thanks to some clever self-promotion, he becomes quite a star.  He also wins the heart of movie star Lois Underwood (Margaret Lindsay).  When he brings Lois by his apartment one night, he’s quite surprised to see Myra there waiting for him.  Myra’s there to blackmail him into helping the gang break into the homes of movie stars or she’ll ruin his career by revealing his past.  Success hasn’t made Dan completely lose his tough guy behavior though and he grabs Myra by the hair and throws her into the hallway.  And people thought the grapefruit scene in The Public Enemy was harsh!  But Dan ultimately goes to the gang and offers them $10,000 if they leave town.  They take the money, but they don’t run.  After they steal some of Lois’ jewelry, Dan catches them and takes the jewelry to return it.  But before he can do that, the police nab him, assume he’s responsible for the robbery, and throw him in jail.  The gang realizes that Dan could really send them all up the river and decides to bail him out of jail and then kill him.  They go to bail Dan out of jail, but little do they know that Dan has a trick up his sleeve.

I love gangster movies and I love comedies, but it seems like the two of those don’t come together terribly often.  I can think of Some Like it Hot and Larceny Inc. off-hand, but it’s really a treat to see James Cagney having some fun with the gangster genre.  Cagney really had great comedic timing and I loved being able to see him work that into that tough guy part he played so brilliantly.  I loved all the in-jokes about The Public Enemy, especially when Mae Clarke is reading from a brochure about Los Angeles and looks concerned when she mentions grapefruits as one of its top crops.  It also gets in some great jabs at the film industry, especially the absurdity of having white actors play different races.  The scene where Cagney gets his skin sprayed to look like an Indian chief is hilarious! It’s another one of those great movies that manages to pack a whole lot into a short run-time.  It’s 75 minutes of pure fun and entertainment.

Penthouse (1933)

Jack Durant (Warner Baxter) is a lawyer who relishes taking on cases other lawyers won’t touch.  He loves defending bootleggers, showgirls, and all the other dregs of society, much to the dismay of his law firm partners.  They would much rather work on more respectable cases and fire Jack after he successfully defends the notorious gangster Tony Gazotti.  His fiancée Sue is also not impressed by the company Jack has been keeping and leaves him for Tom Siddall.  But Tom has been seeing Mimi Montagne (Mae Clarke), who is known to hang around with gangsters.  When Sue agrees to marry Tony, she tells him to end things with Mimi.  Mimi is furious and calls up gangster Jim Crelliman and Jim arranges it so Mimi can publicly humiliate Tom at a party.  When Tom shows up at the party, he and Mimi go out onto the balcony.  Next thing anyone knows, there’s a gunshot and Mimi is dead on the balcony with Tom holding a gun.  Of course, Tom is arrested.  The only person who believes Tom is innocent is Sue, who convinces Jack to take the case.  At first he doesn’t want to, but eventually he comes around to it.  He starts investigating the case with a little help from Tony Gazotti and Mimi’s roommate Gertie Waxted (Myrna Loy), a good-hearted call girl.  But in the process of investigating the crime, Jack falls in love with Gertie.

Penthouse is a true pre-code gem.  The writing is very sharp and innuendo filled, it’s full of some fabulous art deco sets, there are some great suspenseful moments, and it’s quite fast paced.  It’s only 90 minutes long and those 90 minutes just fly by.  I really liked Warner Baxter, he seemed to be having so much fun with his role, and I always like Mynra Loy.  Warner and Myrna were naturals together.  It’s like this was Myrna getting practice for The Thin Man, which came out the following year.  Penthouse is a movie that also appeals to so many different genres.  It’s a gangster movie, it’s a murder mystery, it’s got a love story, and it’s a pre-code all rolled into one.  If you see this one come up on TCM, it’s absolutely worth checking out.  It was so much fun to watch, I just love it!

Waterloo Bridge (1931)

When chorus girl Myra Deauville (Mae Clarke) finds herself out of work, she assumes she’ll be able to find herself a new show soon enough.  Two years later and still no work, she has no choice but to become a hooker to support herself.  She and her friend Kitty (Doris Lloyd) walk the streets together, but one night during an air raid, she stops to help an older woman trying to carry a lot of potatoes.  Roy (Douglass Montgomery), a soldier on leave, stops to help them and when he realizes Myra is an American, the two of them hit it off right away.  Once potato lady was taken care of, he goes back to Myra’s apartment with her to wait out the air raid.  Roy falls madly in love with Myra, and even though Myra feels the same way, she doesn’t want to get too close to him.  She only tells him that she’s an unemployed chorus girl, she doesn’t want him to know she’s a prostitute.

Soon enough, Roy wants to bring Myra out to the country to meet his family.  Of course, she initially refuses, but Roy ends up tricking her into meeting them.  His sister Janet is played by a very young Bette Davis.  His family seems to like her and Roy proposes, but Myra can’t stand having this secret on her conscience so she tells his mother the truth.  Although his mother is very understanding, she asks her not to marry Roy.  The next day, she sneaks back to London without saying goodbye to Roy.  Roy comes back to London to find out what happened and begs her to marry him.  He has to go back to the war very soon, so he’s trying to make it happen fast.  She agrees, but while he’s out of the room, she sneaks out the window.  After she leaves, Roy runs into Myra’s landlord looking to collect the rent.  Myra’s landlord lets the cat out of the bag about what Myra’s real job is, but Roy still loves her.  He heads out to Waterloo Bridge to look for her and finds her mere minutes before he has to leave for the war again.  He begs her to agree to marry him when he comes back or he’ll refuse to leave.  Myra agrees, but alas, their marriage was never meant to be.

Waterloo Bridge is best remembered for the production code era version starring Vivien Leigh and Robert Taylor.  But the 1940 version of Waterloo Bridge only vaguely resembles its pre-code counterpart.  The Vivien Leigh version starts out like the Mae Clarke version, meeting Roy by Waterloo Bridge during an air raid, but then it goes on quite a detour before it resembles the 1931 version again.  First of all, the fact that Myra was a prostitute had to be really downplayed in the Vivien Leigh version.  The whole part about Roy being mistakenly reported as dead never happened in the Mae Clarke version.  Mae Clarke’s Myra is never thrown out of a show because of Roy like Vivien Leigh’s Myra was.  In the Vivien Leigh version, Myra is much more willing to marry Roy while Mae Clarke always tried to avoid it as much as possible.

When I watch Waterloo Bridge, all I can think is how underrated an actress Mae Clarke is.  She’s best remembered for having a grapefruit shoved in her face by James Cagney in The Public Enemy, but you can see in Waterloo Bridge that there was a lot more to her than that.  She had a solid career in the 1930s, but it slowed down by the 40s, and by the 50s and 60s, she was doing a lot of TV stuff and uncredited parts in major movies like Singin’ in the Rain, Pat and Mike, The Catered Affair, and Thoroughly Modern Millie.  Going by her performance here, I really think she really should have been a much bigger star and it’s beyond me why she wasn’t.  It’s her performance that puts this movie on equal footing with Vivien Leigh’s Waterloo Bridge.