“My idea of a vacation is to rest quietly in the shade of a blonde,” Dick Powell said (sounding like something out of Raymond Chandler) to Photoplay magazine. Over their cocktails, Dick had proclaimed to June: “I love you with all my heart. And besides, when you are not around, I have no one to do things for.” June was glad and receptive to hear his words, and asked him to go back together. Dick expounded on his plight: “I've missed laughing with her. I never had any other feeling than we would get back together. I don't think she really wanted the separation in the first place.”—Dick Powell for Photoplay magazine (article "The Three Weeks We'd Like to Forget", July 1957)
The private detective and the police detective have acquired the stature of phlegmatic heroes because of their ability to move in all circles of urban society: institutional and criminal, “respectable” (of seemingly unimpeachable social status) and disreputable (often by implication, as through nightclubs and casinos, the numbers racket, horse racing, organized crime in its various forms, and other illicit personal enterprises). The symbiosis between them and their adversaries—the racketeers, club owners, grifters, and extortionists—contains the basic dramatic tensions in intimidation, submission and betrayal, fear and violence. And the supporting types include petty chiselers, cops on the take, boxing promoters, lounge singers, stoolies, gunsels, molls, and an assortment of down-and-outers. The detective’s mobility exposes him to such characters, and it has hardened his vision in the cynical, all-knowing sense that he accepts how little human behavior can be trusted, how easily betrayal occurs, and how illusory the truth is. All this indeed sounds enrapt in the romantic nihilism that the patina of time has given the noir genre. It is perhaps its most compelling legacy that these movies have shown features of the human condition with a seductive, modern allure, a tawdry glamour at once mesmerizing and disturbing. The handiest representatives of the filmic noir hunters and the hunted—Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum, Robert Ryan, Dan Duryea, Dick Powell, Alan Ladd, Sterling Hayden, Barbara Stanwyck, Gloria Grahame, Claire Trevor, Veronica Lake, Ida Lupino, Lizabeth Scott, Joan Bennett, among many others—all invested their roles with the existential idiom of the noir city.
Four of Chandler’s novels were adapted for the screen within a few years of their writing, in the early period—the pre-1947 period—of noir cinema. Edward Dmytryk’s 1944 Murder, My Sweet (based on Farewell, My Lovely), starring Dick Powell, showed us the most abused Philip Marlowe, beaten, tied down, drugged, and left hurt and hallucinating; Powell's Marlowe details in voice-over and to sardonic effect the sensation felt with each blow he takes. “Philip Marlowe,” Mrs. Helen Grayle (Claire Trevor) ridicules him at first. “A nice name for a duke. You’re just a nice mug.” Dick Powell quite convincingly evokes the cynical weariness of the private eye as a literary entity translated to the screen. André Bazin opined that “Marlowe is a man defined by fate, absurdly victorious from the macabre combat with the dark angel, his face marked by what he has seen and his bearing with all he knows.”
Pitfall (1948), adapted for the screen by Jay Dratler (Laura) from his novel The Pitfall (1947), is lighted so brightly that one can argue effectively about its ironic tone, echoing the ambiguous Garden-of-Eden lure of the unknown, of every impulse that rebels against the safe, placid domesticity. The film's seemingly intended effect was to neuter our more dangerous responses, making us see they can command a huge price. Yet what must be said of what remains? The landscape of John Forbes’s suburbia rarely appears in noir cinema, and to infect it with the darker appeals of human behavior allows us to view it uncomfortably. John’s wife Sue and their little boy are likable, but for John the malaise of achieving only the ordinary leaves a psychic void no doubt felt by many returning vets, who, under the GI Bill, found “paradise in Shady Glen.” Here, “one wrong step taken” exacts a jolting response from a family man who almost loses his safety net to experience the exhilaration of desire. It is a conservative moral on the surface but a subversive message narratively, for John Forbes hungers for the very energy made so palatable in the vulnerability and enigma of an attractive young woman. Mona (Lizabeth Scott) is not wicked, yet she's trouble, and her disruption of John’s life—through his encounters with Mona’s boyfriend in prison and as he helps her with her debts—counterpoint his orderly life. —Street with No Name: A History of the Classic American Film Noir (2002) by Andrew Dickos
Christmas in July (1940) was based on Preston Sturges's A Cup of Coffe play (1931); his screenplay version was successively titled Ants in Their Pants and The New Yorkers. A Cup of Coffee finally became Christmas in July, the second movie Sturges wrote and directed. After some bargaining, he got his old theatre friend, Alexander Carr, to play the department store owner, Mr. Schindel. And for Schindel's Department Store, Sturges invented the wonderful "Davenola," an all-service davenport-sleeper-Iounger-bar-and cabinet unit. After many casting possibilities, including a young William Holden, Dick Powell was chosen for the part of the lead Jimmy MacDonald. Sturges appreciated the Eagle Scout quality that Powell could bring to the character. His role was a far more demanding and complex variation of Powell's boy-next-door parts of his 1930s musicals. As much as The Great McGinty satirized the flaws and self-serving opportunities for unscrupulous behavior in the American political machinery, so did Christmas in July cast a skeptical look at the pursuit of recognition and fortune in an all-out consumerist society.
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Christmas in July came out in September of 1940 and, like The Great McGinty, enjoyed a tremendous popular and critical success. After directing Christmas in July, Paramount, flabbergasted, noticed that Sturges had been working without a contract and finally gave him one. The Players Club on the Sunset Strip became, like Michael Romanoff's restaurant and lounge, a popular meeting place for the Hollywood film community; and Sturges luxuriated in the role of host to a number of emigré film artists from occupied Europe, offering a congenial haven for Fritz Lang, Max Ophuls, René Clair, Jean Renoir, Julien Duvivier, Billy Wilder, and others. His hospitality became legendary and limitless, and tabs were run up only to be graciously and trivially forgotten by Sturges. Christmas in July's editor Ellsworth Hoagland saw once the lead stars Dick Powell and Ellen Drew engaging playfully at the Players' pantry. Frank Lloyd Wright, fast becoming an ardent fan, began requesting private screenings of Sturges' films at his Taliesin Institute in Scottsdale, Arizona, and Spring Green, Wisconsin.
Sturges said once: "My friend [filmmaker] Rouben Mamoulian told me he could make the audience be interested in whatever he showed them, and I told him he was mistaken. It's true that he can bend my ear down and force me to look at a doorknob when my reflex wants to see the face of the girl saying goodbye, but it is also true that it stops my comprehension of the scene, destroys my interest and gives me a pain in the neck." Sturges (tinkerer, inventor, filmmaker) had a real fondness for Dick Powell's Jimmy MacDonald ("If you can't sleep at night, it's not the coffee, it's the bunk. It's a pun! Get it?"), and Christmas in July counterbalances the bitterness of The Great McGinty to an extent that the films function as the former's companion presenting two sides of Preston Sturges. Both Christmas in July and McGinty reveal conflicting ideas and feelings about the American society, structured at the expense and enervation of a success ethic. Unlike McGinty, Christmas in July has more energy and mania that Sturges captured so brilliantly in Hail the Conquering Hero. The reception for Jimmy as he tells his neighbors, laden with presents for everyone, about winning the Maxford House Coffee Contest, anticipates the crowd scenes in Sturges' later Paramount films.
Christmas in July presents an ambivalent view of America as a place that challenges the ambitious but offers a dubious reward for such expended energy. Jimmy innocently wants to offer Betty (Ellen Drew) and his mother (Georgia Caine) the comforts and security they do not have, but he emerges as a victim of a disloyal society. He wants to prove himself as an advertising talent, ironically according to those standards fashioned to appease and vindicate the rich at the expense of the poor. Here Sturges implies an acceptance of this success ethic, with some reservation: the ambitious who feed on this energy resent the moneyed class. Jimmy and Betty listen to "Penthouse Serenade" as they talk of their dreams. There is also a sweet and innocent moment of them in leisurely stroll, captured in medium-long tracking shot. And another terribly vulnerable moment, as well, for their hopes and Jimmy's aspirations are precarious at best, and we see at the end of the story that hope prevails only at Betty's imploring. The hoax has been exposed, a dejected Jimmy confesses to Mr. Baxter (Ernest Truex), and she interrupts: "it's one thing to muff a chance when you get it... but it's another thing never to have had a chance." Mr. Waterbury defensively protests earlier in the story that he "is not a failure." "You see," he goes on, "ambition is all right, if it works, but no system could be right where only one half of one per cent were successes and all the rest were failures." The virtues of a capitalist system can be easily dislodged.
Success in Christmas in July is far more than winning the prize money of a slogan contest; it is the using up of creative ambition, of having the opportunity actively to test one's imagination in a society designed as a competitive marketplace. When Jimmy and Betty are dreaming their dreams together up on the roof, their dialogue is soft and relaxed, the natural banter of two young people in love. The camera follows them as Jimmy talks about accomplishing his goals, and we understand the need to feel the promise of unlimited possibilities. Hence, humor erupts from bitterness as well as sentimentality, from sarcasm and gentleness, and from subtle wryness as much as a pun, a play on words. —Intrepid Laughter: Preston Sturges and the Movies (2013) by Andrew Dickos
Dick Powell was assigned to work with Al Jolson (Ruby Keeler's husband) when he was presented with the script for Wonder Bar (1934), but his optimist attitude soon changed when the film went into production. "Jolson took the good song that was assigned to me and gave me in exchange the eight bars he didn't like," Powell told the press. Jolson was married to Ruby Keeler at the time, and since Keeler and Powell were a team, Powell expected to be built up, not whittled down. The issue in question was that Jolson was insanely jealous of Powell's romantic scenes with his wife onscreen. Often, he'd complain to Ruby: "Why is that guy always kissing you?", referring to her co-star Dick Powell. Fortunately, in spite of Jolson, Powell is memorable in Wonder Bar because of one great song. "Don't Say Goodnight" gets the star treatment with a dance number that unfolds into a dazzling Berkeley production. Powell was sometimes baffled by choreographer Busby Berkeley's abilities. In "Don't Say Goodnight," mirrors are used to reflect a few dancers to seem like hundreds.
Powell said, "I could never figure out how Buzz could photograph this complicated routine from inside the octagon of mirrors and not have his camera reflected in the mirrors. But he had it all figured out and he explained it to Sol Polito, who was the director of photography. I think Sol was as baffled as the rest of us. Buzz was a genius, a madman, and after a while we accepted that he could do anything." In the 1920s and ‘30s, Ruby Keeler perfected the part of the ingenue, the fairy princess. Her fancy footwork—energetic more than stylish—her lithe figure and dominating eyes gained her featured roles around New York, and an offer to play opposite Eddie Cantor in Florenz Ziegfeld’s “Whoopee.” Keeler met the celebrated Jolson while dancing at raconteur Texas Guinan’s Hollywood club where she dwelled while awaiting rehearsals of “Whoopee.” Jolson, probably Broadway’s biggest star at the time, followed Miss Keeler back to New York, where they were married in 1928. Jolson helped Keeler get a contract with his studio, Warner Bros., where she appeared in nearly a dozen movie musicals, among them “42nd Street” (1933), “Footlight Parade” (1933) and “Gold Diggers of 1933,” now considered genre classics. “I could do a few dance routines but I didn’t have a voice,” she said in 1973. “I always dreaded the part when I had to sing back to Dick Powell.”
Columnist Hedda Hopper reported that at the height of her career, Ruby Keeler made the then-monumental sum of nearly $5,000 a week and received carloads of fan mail. Miss Keeler, in real life, never quite realized Baxter’s chorus-girl-to-star admonition. While her colleagues in the chorus—Ginger Rogers, Lucille Ball, Joan Crawford—ascended to the heights of fame, she continued to be more a celebrity than a star. But she became the perfect foil for such sharpies as tough guy James Cagney (“Footlight Parade”) and such hard-boiled dames as Joan Blondell (“Gold Diggers of 1933”). Ruby Keeler's characters often were entangled in love triangles or backstage brawls, not because they were bad—just good to a fault. Ruby Keeler and her beau, usually boyish Dick Powell, always depended on love to conquer the world, whether the backdrop was the back alleys of Broadway, the hallowed halls of West Point (“Flirtation Walk,” 1934) or the Ivy League (“Sweetheart of the Campus” with Ozzie Nelson, 1941). Dick Powell considered Ruby "a wonderful co-star" and the admiration was mutual. Ruby usually relied on Powell's advice to enhance their musical scenes.
Although there were rumors about a possible liaison, it doesn't seem too likely, due to Jolson's controlling nature and Powell being married to vampy co-star Joan Blondell. The sound technicians said Powell sounded like a bashful lover in her scenes with Ruby: '[Powell] kisses softly, without making much sound. The microphone must be held just six inches away." Richard Williams, one of the sound technician noticed that Dick and Ruby looked and sounded sweet and soft. Despite their eventual divorce, Jolson maintained that their 11 years together had been “the happiest of my life.” Jolson had to give Keeler a settlement of $500 a week and a $50,000 lump sum when she remarriaged. She also received custody of their adopted son, Albert. After her second marriage in 1941, Ruby Keeler retired to devote herself to home life and became what the Associated Press once called “the nation’s happiest exponent of motherhood, housewifery, and golf.” In the early 1940s, producer Mike Todd became fixated on Joan Blondell. His obsessive courtship doomed her marriage to Dick Powell, who was already smitten with future wife June Allyson, whom he met in Broadway in 1942. —The Women of Warner Brothers (2002) by Daniel Bubbeo
A salute to Dick Powell: He's a decent sort of chap and one deserving of our admiration. Dick Powell, who is disliked only by people who don't know him, has done some of the nicest things of any person in Hollywood. But no one ever hears of that side of Dick. One of the most generous gestures I've ever heard of anyone making in a town where it is normally a case of "dog eat dog," Dick made it without fanfare. When crooner Phil Regan (who had performed with Guy Lombardo and his orchestra) wasn't getting the breaks Dick thought his voice merited, Dick went into the front office and spent half a day there begging various officials to give Phil the lead in a picture, We're in the Money, that had been intended for Dick. And people talk of professional jealousy! —Screenland magazine (May 1936)
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