Here Comes Carter

In his brief career Ross Alexander as was the lot of so many B picture actors got the castoffs that the players higher up on the Warner Brothers food chain discarded. Watching Here Comes Carter you can see folks like James Cagney, Pat O'Brien, and Dick Powell doing the role of the fast talking press agent turned gossip columnist who's got a grudge to settle with a ham actor.

Even in the Thirties the audience had seen all this before. When actor Craig Reynolds tells him to kill a story involving wife the public doesn't know he has, Alexander says no and Reynolds gets him canned.

Our resourceful hero is down, but not out. By sheer chutzpah, Alexander gets himself a position as a Walter Winchell like radio commentator and manages to settle a few scores before this less than an hour long film has run its course.

Ross has two girls in pursuit of him, radio singer Anne Nagel and secretary Glenda Farrell. Watch the film if you want to see who he winds up with. Also note that Wayne Morris has a small bit part as a short order cook and future Oscar winner Jane Wyman is in an even briefer part as a nurse.

Poor Ross Alexander died by his own hand shortly after meeting and marrying Anne Nagel. But the studio system already had someone in line for his parts, a young radio announcer named Ronald Reagan was waiting in the wings. Now that was a career that went somewhere.

Alexander's character had an annoying habit of punctuating each tidbit of gossip with a 'ho-ho' to his audience. The critics gave this film the old heave ho.

Except for early glimpses of up-and-coming stars like WAYNE MORRIS (as a fast food counter man) and JANE WYMAN (barely visible), HERE COMES CARTER is strictly routine stuff with ROSS Alexander cast as a brash and very smug newsman, a central character you can't help dislike.

GLENDA FARRELL trades barbs with him as a tough talking secretary in her usual brisk manner. The foolish plot is something about a man who loses his job because of an indiscreet column blasting a colleague, handsome CRAIG REYNOLDS. He then has to spend the rest of the story planning his comeback.

Alexander gives a one-note performance, full of brash mannerisms and nothing else. ANNE NAGEL, who became his future wife in real life, plays his secretary with a lovely singing voice with aspirations of her own. Neither one went on to establish themselves in films, Alexander taking his own life shortly after marrying her and Nagle's career stifled by B-films and serials for the duration of her career.

With roles like this, it's no wonder Alexander was highly dissatisfied with the turn his career was taking.

This amusing but overly frantic second feature comedy stars Ross Alexander as a Hollywood press agent who is fired from his job flacking at a movie studio and becomes a radio reporter on Tinseltown, dishing the dirt. Alexander co-stars with future wife Anne Nagel, but the show is stolen by Charley Foy and by Glenda Farrel as a hard-boiled secretary at the radio station.

Ross Alexander is an interesting performer, but his manner in this role is a little too loud when he opens his mouth, half Walter Winchell and half Ted Lewis, although when he lies back on his heels for a reaction shot, he seems made for the movies. Alexander was being cast in Dick Powell's cast-offs at this point and his director here, Clemens, doesn't add much to this one-hour featurette.

"Here Comes Carter" is one of those cinematic throwaways that Warner Bros. (and the other major studios) ground out back in the pre-television days. It stars Ross Alexander, a likable young performer and closeted homosexual who killed himself at the age of 29, Glenda Farrell back when she was still a knockout and Anne Nagel who was a better actress than most of the glamour girls on the Warner Bros. lot. The plot doesn't make a whole lotta' sense. One minute, Carter is a movie studio publicist, the next he's an imitation Winchell, broadcasting Hollywood gossip. There's a subplot about a gangster's plan to bump off Carter but that gets lost in the shuffle. One suspects that the screenwriters were making this thing up just in time to send pages of script to the sound stage where the movie was already filming. Yet, in its own hackneyed way, "Here Comes Carter" is fun.

Ross Alexander stars in "Here Comes Carter," a one-hour programmer from Warner Brothers.

Alexander was given roles that were rejected by the Warners stars. Here he plays a press agent, Carter, who is fired when an actor orders him to kill a story. Carter becomes a radio gossip columnist and doesn't get mad, he gets even.

He has two women interested in him -- a radio singer (Alexander's future wife, Anna Nagel) and Glenda Farrell, who plays a secretary.

If you look fast and hard you'll see Wayne Morris as a short-order cook and Jane Wyman as a nurse.

Alexander isn't very good, he's quite loud and brash.

Alexander's story is one of the most tragic in Hollywood. This was his second-last film before he blew his brains out at the age of 29. A successful Broadway actor, he was a closet homosexual.

At the time of his death, he was married to Anne Nagel, and it unfortunately affected her career as well, as his suicide was traumatic for her. She died penniless at age 50.

Not very good and, given the fate of the stars, a real downer.