Warren William, Titan o' Vitaphone: THE MOUTHPIECE, SATAN MET A LADY, SECRET BRIDE, THREE ON A MATCH,

Fridays this month on TCM are devoted to pre-code Hollywood and, honey, pre-code Hollywood is devoted to its King Tut, Warren William. Maestro of Satanic bravado and merry carnivore sparkle, if Basil Rathbone and Errol Flynn in Robin Hood joined souls instead of swords, Warren William would be the result, and for Depression era audiences he was such a charming, sinister figure he stole them right along with the ex-chequer's bank vault, despite his amok capitalist characters being so emblematic of what tanked the stock market in the first place. In pre-sound era terms, it would be like if the girl and the audience rooted for the mustache-twirling villain instead of the handsome hero. For Depression era audiences, the handsome hero was a corn-fed rube. And William was king, ascending the throne in 1932, when America was still in its Depression and Prohibition death spiral and there seemed no hope for lifting it back up except via the same crazy capitalists who'd brought them so low. William might not give a shit about the common joe's suffering, but he didn't waste time scamming them either. He scammed the fat cats who scammed the small joes. While they harrumphed helplessly, William aimed his cigar / wolfish nose-chin combination down at the fat cats like a triple revolver and cleaned their pockets. And if he stole the hero's girlfriend on his way out, fuck 'im. By then we hated the square hero, he's the one got us into all this, with his blind faith and corny earnestness. He should have been boiling fat cats in oil or dragging them to the guillotine rather than dutifully working himself to death in service of the giant black Dust Bowl cloud Yaweh or fat cat mining company. You had to be soft in the head--like Joan Crawford or Loretta Young over at MGM--to think the homespun decent folks Americana small town ideal wasn't a bogus con passed down by the fat cats' sour matron moralist wives to help them smile extra smugly in church and confiscate poorer women's children in some weird venomous outpouring of her own stifled sexuality and creative expression. Guillotine the rich, or work yourself bravely to death like that poor trusting horse in ANIMAL FARM! See an MGM film and there's no doubt which choice they advocate. Warner's? Timmmmbre!

Alas, sometimes even tough-minded Vitaphone demanded William get a 'conscience' and start doing the right thing, but aside from a glimmer in his eye as he dutifully shed a tear in the name of good common decency, all he ended up with was a few bullets from the guns of the people he double-crossed. As Handsome Harry once said, "the trouble with reformers is, they always try to rain on everyone else's business."


And anyway, at savvy WB, the average workaday joes and handsome college boy heroes were played by annoying little pishers like Louis Hayward (the schmuck babbling about Babs in the tiger blind in RED DUST), or Charles Farrell, Randolph Scott (as the virgin geologist in HOT SATURDAY), or Norman Foster in SKYSCRAPER SOULS (1933), who relentlessly paws and stalks Maureen O’Sullivan, just because he happens to be her age and social class; Warren William develops eyes for her himself and who wouldn’t? Look at those legs! And anyway, she works for him and sexual harassment laws are still just a distant troubling tom-tom in 1933--Foster is so full of himself and his presumptive ladykiller charm, he literally makes it impossible for her to do her job. I had a guy like that haunting my assistant one time, and I kicked him out of the building! It's a boss's job to make sure his female employees aren't harassed at the workplace, which is why he sometimes needs to protect them, personally, even if takes all night.

Warner's made a star out of William via this snappy fictionalizing version of legendary mob defense lawyer Bill Fallon. And until some hick dame puts him noble he's pretty badass, starting off as a an assistant D.A. but quitting after sending an innocent mug to the chair, determined to make sure no more murder charges ever stick. We can see why it would shake him; it's a pretty harrowing moment, ably rendered by a mere dimming of the prison lights before the warden can even make it to the hallway after getting the call. These calls come through so often so when it's too late, it's quite a shock. So as in all these type films (William Powell played versions of Fallon for Warners, too, in Lawyer Man and For the Defense), William becomes a big shot gangland defense lawyer and drinks (Guy Kibbee is his patient local speak proprietor) and sleeps around with impunity (look fast for Paulette Godard) while gal Friday Aline McMahon adds adds notes of warm complexity: half detox nurse-half Leporello crossed with Joan from Mad Men, she's become so adept at Moneypenny-esque faux flirting that even she can't remember if there's any real desire underneath it, and tall enough and physical enough that she can believably help heave William onto his feet when he's dead drunk.

Aline McMahon: What a gal

Anyway, they're a great team, and all is well, with a few defense strategies so outlandish they must have been based on real life cases (William here drinks poison to prove its not poison, in other versions he throws a vial supposedly full of nitro glycerine), but then it all goes to hell when a hick typist in the pool turns down his wolfish advances because she's lousy with the type of small town "integrity" Sydney Falco and J.J. Hunsecker would later sneer at. But in 1931 there were only a few years left to even talk about other options to that same kind of sentimental malarkey before the code would insist on it, which makes William's defection from evil all the more heartbreaking.  Sidney Fox is the hick who sways him, John Wray the chump she's sweet on, who (of course) winds up implicated when he's robbed carrying a shipment of bonds. You can guess the rest. It's all worth it for a giddy stretch in the beginning where William rockets through his day, pausing to lift $10,000 fee out of an embezzler's stash before returning what's left to the employer on the condition he doesn't press charges. For this one crazy stretch, The Mouthpiece is a master... work.  It's the role that made William a star. It will make you a fan.

Before it gets bogged down in needless variations on The Maltese Falcon this is pretty fun, and even after. Effie (Marie Wilson) known here as 'Miss Murgatroyd' below left, is an adorable little ditzy Red Riding Hood who has great chemistry with the big bad wolf Warren William - she's as tall standing as he is seated. And the way she rolls with his wolfish come-ons makes them a perfect pair. She all but grabs onto his fur and rides him to grandma's house.

Made in 1936 (after the code, but Mister, ya coulda fooled me) it co-stars a very young Bette Davis in the Mary Astor role--she's much less coy in this version, and Williams seems to prefer her that way--and Alison Skipworth as the conniving Gutman. I couldn’t find billing for the unsightly Tweedle Dum type who keeps releating “I told you once, Mister…” as her neurotic gunsel son. He’s no Elisha Cook Jr. Then again, who is?

The best ham-swap comes with the fey Joel Cairo, here a tall, game-for-what-for English gentlemen (played by Arthur Treacher), he brings his own quirky wit to the proceedings and the scene where William helps him ransack his own apartment looking for the 'horn,'c’est magnifique! It's like the Marx Brothers and John Huston had a baby. Williams must have been huffing laughing gas off camera and it's very psychedelic to see him so blithely unattached to his possessions and personal space-- whether breaking things, repairing them, or doting over Williams' little black book like it's a newborn litter of kittens, it's a scene that--in screwball pre-code hipness--could be the drunken grandfather of Altman's The Long Goodbye. Rather than a long stretch of time in Spade's apartment waiting for a package, the big climax meets Captain Jacobi's boat down at the rainy docks for a good old-fashioned shoot-out. The horn filled with jewels, and Alison Skipworth enjoying talking to a man who likes talking to a man who likes to talk might seem like pointless alterations, but this movie's a nitrous oxide four-alarm fire.


Davis meanwhile smokes and wields a gun like a pro, at times annoyed Williams' not taking the gun she's jamming in his ribs more seriously. If you can recall the moment where, after giving Cairo back his gun upon receipt of the two hundred dollars, Cairo turns it on him and says "Clasp your hands behind your head, Mr. Spade..." and he just smiles and laughs, saying "Go ahead! I won't stop ya..." That, my friend, that moment of justifiably condescending but good natured merry surrender, is how William plays the whole damn movie. And unless you're like Davis, trying to establish her duplicitousness, than Williams' fun is contagious. If you've seen Huston's remake a few dozen times (if not, you should) then the use of so much of the same dialogue under such bizarre, nearly Godardian tweakage, is startling. While the whole cast bounces merrily on his lap, William seems like he’s having such a good time he can barely remember his lines; is he huffing laughing gas between takes? Who cares though, since he's basically the same character as in the other versions of the story and we already know the 1941 version so much? They may just as well just read the book aloud and mix some drinks.

Three girls meet while going Brooklyn public school (allowing for plenty of ethnic stereotyping - oy vey) and stay friends even after going separate ways up and down the New York City economic ladder (pre-code Warners loved showing their adult subjects as children first --God knows why, and maybe social workers). Joan Blondell winds up in a reform school, Bette Davis learns to type and settles into a nice cog-in-the-machine-shape for the duration, Ann Dvorak marries the rich guy (Warren William) and becomes a nymphomaniac alcoholic who feels strangled by the touch of any man dumb enough to treat her with respect.They end up running into each other and sharing the ominous match on a post-lunch round of cigarettes:  She has Williams' kid, then goes running amok with smooth-talking idiot Lyle Talbot, who gets them both in deep with some low-down mobsters (Bogart, Allen Jenkins, Ed Arnold) who figure they can collect big by holding the kid for ransom. With the 24/7 carrying on (and only cocktail peanuts for meals), the poor kid becomes a seriously neglected urchin, all while William looks desperately for the boy, finally procuring the help of the now reformed Blondell and Davis, who by then has nearly typed herself sexless. She must have really loved being relegated to glorified extra. But hey, she gets to be the kid's nanny when all's said and done, if that helps any. It should. In 1933 she could still hold her own in a bathing suit. Better get it on record, darling. In a few decades you'll be back on that beach in a very different seaside ensemble, toting a malnourished Joan Crawford instead of a finally-fed Dickie Moore.


Blondell is her usual reliable self, good-natured and morally flexible, inherently decent without being a drag about it; Dvorak's big tragic spiral out of control is awesome, seeing kids suffering from neglect to the point even Bogart's slimy gangster is concerned (he makes a wry cocaine nose gesture to indicate what Dvorak's doing in the other room). If even the gangsters are worried about your kid, then your kid's got problems. It's shocking stuff, second only to the deprivation / starvation of the kids in Night Nurse, the kind of thing we just wouldn't see after the code, and it's those post-code saintly kids that gave kids a bad name in the movies, since we all know kids aren't saints, they're complex little heathens. Dickie Moore can be unbearably cutesy pie in the wrong hands, but throw him into the next room during an all-night gangster poker game while his mom lies drunk and unconscious for weeks at a stretch, and now he's legitimately heartbreaking. FINALLY!

William meanwhile is just the sugar daddy here-- a noncomedic variation on his role in Gold Diggers (he wound up with Joan there, too) as the sensible Daddy Warbucks for the gang. That's the way it was in these punchy mellers from the WB though; the whole thing rips past your stunned eyes so fast you can barely light your twentieth cigarette before it's all over but the scraping off the sidewalk. 'hiccup.'