Walking Down Broadway

This film is more famous for what you don't see than what you do. What you don't see is whatever it is that the original director, Erich Von Stroheim, shot that was left on the cutting room floor after Fox basically re-shot the picture. Apparently it was too gritty for what Fox had in mind, and Alan Crosland of "The Jazz Singer" fame was brought in to direct.

This is a simple little "lonely boy meets lonely girl in the big city" story. Three girls who live in the same apartment building in New York City go strolling down the street in search of men. They find a couple of them - nice guy Jimmy (James Dunn) and his lecherous friend Mac. Millie (Zasu Pitts) falls in a muddy water filled ditch, so now the group is evenly paired. Jimmy and Peggy hit it off, but not until after Mac makes a pass at Peggy and she rejects him. Complications ensue.

James Dunn really saves the picture with his optimistic and likable every-man persona that he did so well. In spite of the short running time you really feel the chemistry between himself and Peggy. Zasu Pitts is good as a rather backwards homely girl who strikes out in an uncharacteristic and venomous way towards the end of the picture. Will Stanton plays the same obnoxious drunk that he played in "Me and My Gal" and makes you want to change the channel every time he shows up - he's that annoying and completely unfunny. Before the film is over Stanton proves that three things that fire and explosions can't destroy are roaches, termites, and his act. Recommended for the curiosity factor of it all.

Dawn Powell was sort of the poor man's Dorothy Parker, a wisecracking writer with unusually astute observations about New York, boy-girl troubles, and, especially, the behind-the-eight-ball position of the 1920s and 1930s Everywoman. All those qualities are present in her play "Walking Down Broadway," but they're filtered and standardized in this adaptation, begun by Erich von Stroheim and completed by others. A Fox pre-Production Code product, it does have unusual raciness, its hero and heroine a sweet young couple who face a premarital blessed event and don't get struck by lightning for it. But Powell's insights are compromised by 1) unwelcome comic relief, 2) Zasu Pitts getting second billing but in a small and mostly extraneous part, a character who makes no sense, and 3) a really phony, movie-invented Act Three climax. For all that, James Dunn and Boots Mallory are sympathetic in the leads, and the Minna Gombell character -- a wise, five-times-married good-time girl -- does get off a couple of good ones that have the authentic Dawn Powell ring.

A girl meets boy story, most interesting for what may have been left out. Originally written and directed by Erich von Stroheim, the result tested poorly, so new scenes were shot and the picture was recut. Unfortunately, what is left is not very exciting, even with an attempted rape and the female lead getting pregnant out of wedlock.

There are a few scenes shot in Coney Island's Luna Park.

"Hello, Sister!" is a film that clearly could not have been made the same way had it been made only a year or so later. This is because the new Production Code which took effect in July, 1934 forbade several things you'll see in this film...and unlike the prior code, this one had teeth and greatly changed Hollywood.

Two young women spend most of their free time at home in their apartment. Their neighbor convinces them to go out and have a good time with some men...and Peggy (Boots Mallory) meets Jimmy (James Dunn). They hit it off very well and she invites him to her apartment to talk. All they do is talk...but such things would NOT have been allowed with the Production Code...especially since she's wearing a house coat! After he leaves, however, another man pushes his way into her apartment and rapes her. While they don't show the rape and you only know it's a rape later when she ends up pregnant, the physical assault on her and her neighbor by this monster is VERY vivid. Again, there is no way any of this would have been allowed in the Code era. Now Peggy has a problem...she's in love with Jimmy but is afraid to tell him.

The rape was handled oddly. While they fortunately didn't show it, when she finds she is pregnant, the doctor is nice but talks about the baby as if she made some sort of mistake....and she never tells him about the rape. But this also brings up an interesting issue...when Jimmy finds out, he assumes it's his...which means it might be his AND they were having relations...again, NOT a Code sort of plot!! What's next? See the film.

I appreciate that the film discusses rape...an important social problem. But it does it in a rather muddled way. Additionally, there's an ultra-bizarro subplot involving a drunk who is stockpiling explosives....which just seems to come from out of the middle of no where! As a result, the film isn't particularly good...though it IS interesting and worth seeing if you want to see how far Pre-Code films could go compared to the Code films of the following year.

This forgotten melodrama belongs to a special category: it's one of those movies with a behind-the-scenes story that's more interesting than the material that made it to the screen. Judged strictly in terms of content 'Hello, Sister!' isn't all that bad, nor is it especially memorable, either. It's essentially a Boy Meets Girl story in an urban setting, and aside from the occasional offbeat touch there's little to distinguish it from standard Hollywood product of the time. Considering what might have been, however, it ranks as a major disappointment, and also marks the ignominious end of a once great directorial career.

The project began with a stage play by novelist Dawn Powell called "Walking Down Broadway." The play concerns two young women who come to New York from a small town and find it difficult to meet decent men. Then one of them, Madge, meets a good guy. They fall in love, and she becomes pregnant. The lovers argue and break up. A woman friend helps Madge get an abortion, and she eventually reunites with her boyfriend. Powell couldn't interest anyone in staging her play, but managed to sell it to Fox Films. ("Walking Down Broadway" finally received a belated premiere production by NYC's Mint Theater Company in 2005, forty years after Powell's death.) Even in the Pre-Code era the medical termination of a pregnancy was a taboo subject, but Powell's dialog was sharp and pungent, and the story of troubled romance in the big city held the potential for an effective screen drama.

Oddly enough, the first director associated with this project was none other than Erich Von Stroheim. Stroheim is not the first name that comes to mind for material of this nature: he was best known for his work from the silent era, often tales of aristocratic decadence, set in Europe before the First World War. Powell's story was contemporary and concerned the struggles of young, middle-class American types, more along the lines of King Vidor's The Crowd than Stroheim's imperial spectacles. On the other hand, Stroheim also made Greed, which concerned lower middle-class life in San Francisco. But he had not yet directed a talkie, and his position as a director in Hollywood at this time was tenuous in the extreme. Stroheim was known for financial extravagance and bizarre behavior on the set. More to the point, perhaps, he hadn't had a hit to his credit since the mid-'20s, and was blamed for the collapse of Queen Kelly, an unfinished collaboration with Gloria Swanson that lost a fortune.

It's unclear whether Stroheim chose to adapt Powell's story or if the Fox front office assigned it to him, but once he set to work on it he did so with relish. While keeping the basic story-line of two small town women in the big city, Stroheim made a number of changes. The central female character was renamed Peggy, and the role of her roommate (a chubby, giggling flirt in the play) was reworked as a neurotic spinster called Minnie for Stroheim's perennial favorite ZaSu Pitts. Newcomer Boots Mallory was cast as Peggy, while Jimmy, the young man who attracts her eye, was portrayed by Fox's up-and-coming leading man James Dunn. Mallory was a good choice, fresh and pretty yet not too glamorous, but Dunn's casting was ill-advised: he was in his 30s and appeared older, and it's hard to accept his Jimmy as inexperienced and naive. (Someone like Dick Powell would have been more appropriate.) Stroheim took the play's tomcat character Mac and turned him into a rotter who attempts to rape Peggy, and also concocted a sequence in which Minnie succumbs to despair and uses a gas oven to attempt suicide. The gas causes an explosion and fire that engulfs the women's apartment building, leading to an action-packed climax quite different (i.e. more "Hollywood") from the wistful conclusion of Powell's play.

Stroheim completed his work on the project in the fall of 1932, on schedule and within the allotted budget, but, as so often happened in his star-crossed career, trouble erupted almost immediately. Stroheim's film was gamy and raw, and Fox's top brass were worried about censorship issues. At the same time a power struggle between the studio's executives resulted in the ascension of producer Sol Wurtzel, who favored lightweight escapist fare. Wurtzel and Stroheim despised each other, and it was Wurtzel who chose to bring in a new director and screenwriter and have much of the film re-shot. Stroheim's name was removed from the credits and most of his footage was discarded, while some of his scenes were inter-cut with material created by others. It is only this re-titled hybrid version of the film which survives today.

Given its troubled history, the movie is exceptionally difficult to evaluate objectively. Unsurprisingly, the tone is inconsistent. Much of the material featuring Mallory, Dunn, and Pitts has the feel of a routine comedy-drama, while other sequences, such as Mac's attempted rape of Peggy, are startlingly intense. Even this sequence is undercut by the insertion of "comic relief" moments added after Stroheim's departure. Worse still, an actor named Will Stanton who specialized in playing drunks was written into the story in a recurring role. (It was the woefully unfunny Stanton who almost ruined Raoul Walsh's Me and My Gal, also made at Fox in 1932.) Minnie makes no attempt at suicide in the reworked version of the film; it is Stanton's supposedly funny drunk who causes the climactic fire. If that was intended as comic relief, it failed.

'Hello, Sister!' was released with little fanfare, and was quickly forgotten. Sadly, Erich Von Stroheim was never again entrusted with another directorial assignment. What survives of his work in this film suggests a vibrant if seamy slice-of-life saga that could have ranked with the most memorable dramas of the Pre-Code era. Instead, it's one more case of What Might Have Been in a career that suffered more than its share of such calamities.