Blessed Event

"What do you want to interview Mr. Roberts about?" "Oh you know, how he lives, and where he goes, and what he thinks about." "My dear, you think they would print that in a high school paper?"

This is a satire of Walter Winchell, the ruthless gossip columnist who wielded great power for decades in the entertainment industry, and who by 1932 had already achieved celebrity. He's played here by slick talking Lee Tracy, a good fit for the role, but I found the character so unlikeable that when he was made out to be the good guy, it was tough to enjoy.

The character loves publishing secrets and personal details that ruffle feathers, e.g. Upcoming birth announcements ("blessed events") with due dates less than nine months after a couple got married. People sue the paper, but that just fans the flames and he goes merrily along raking in money (the $90,000 a year is over $2 million in today's money). His assistant (Ruth Donnelly) is feisty and a good supporting character, handling a deluge of phone calls and cracking jokes like "You want to see Mr. Roberts? Oh, you want to SUE Mr. Roberts? The line forms on the left." Unfortunately, the scenes of him frenetically operating in the newsroom got a little monotonous despite their energy level, with the exception of his rather gruesome description of electrocution to intimidate a gangster (Allen Jenkins).

Things go especially sour when the gossip columnist reports about a desperate young woman (Isabel Jewell) who's pregnant and literally just told him she's suicidal over the idea of people finding out. Instead of making this a point of reckoning for the character, the script pays lip service to a little guilt, then has him be the hero in standing up to gangsters as well as his rival (a crooner played by Dick Powell, in his very first film). By the end I had really tired of the character and how it was playing out, hence the middling review score.

Interesting quote about TV, pretty early for 1932: "Ask him about sex appeal by television." "By television? I'll tell you right now it'll never prove a popular method."

Fast paced and very clever Lee Tracy vehicle playing a Walter W. type gossip columnist with a grudge against "crooners"generally and one in particular played by Dick Powell. Definitely precode with dialogue and subject matter that would have been totally rejected just a few years later. One scene culminates in a phrase spoken by Tracy's"mother" containg a word that rocked the film world at the end of Gone With the Wind. Among other wonderful sequences watch for Tracy's evocation of a trip to the "hot seat", and Dick Powell's rendition of a singing commercial extolling the qualities of"Shapiro's Shoes". With Shapiro himeself beaming at his side. Do catch this film also a similar effort also with Tracey "The Half Naked Truth".

Lee Tracy is one of the lost joys of the pre-Code era. He mostly played newspapermen (he was Hildy Johnson in the original Broadway production of The Front Page) with a sideline in press agents, and whatever his racket he epitomized the brash, fast-talking, crafty, stop-at-nothing operator. He makes Cagney look bashful, skating around in perpetual, delirious overdrive, gesticulating and spitting out his lines like an articulate machine-gun, wheedling and needling and swearing on his mother's life as he lies through his teeth. He was homely and scrawny, with a raspy nasal voice, and he always played cocky, devious scoundrels, yet you find yourself rooting for him and reveling in his sheer energy and shameless moxie. Audiences of the early thirties loved his snappy style and irrepressible irreverence; they loved him because he was nobody's fool. He's a rare example of a character actor—that guy who always plays reporters—who through force of personality, and the luck of embodying the zeitgeist, had a brief reign as a star.

In BLESSED EVENT he plays Alvin Roberts, a character based so closely on Walter Winchell that Winchell could have sued--but he probably loved it. When we first meet Alvin, he's a lowly kid from the ad department who has been given a chance to sub for a gossip columnist and gotten in trouble for filling the column with dirt—primarily announcements of who is "anticipating a blessed event" without the proper matrimonial surroundings. Soon he's become an all-powerful celebrity and made scores of enemies, including a gangster willing to bump him off to shut him up. There's a subplot about Alvin's ongoing feud with a smarmy crooner, Bunny Harmon, played by Dick Powell. Anyone who finds Powell in his crooning days repellent will appreciate Tracy's merciless vendetta. Actually, I think Powell is being deliberately irritating here—even in Busby Berkeley films he's not so egregiously perky and fey. He does sing one good song, "Too Many Tears" (a theme throughout the film), and a wonderfully witless radio jingle for "Shapiro's Shoes."

Alvin's standard greeting is, "What do you know that I don't?" The answer is nothing—at least not for long. But he's surrounded by worthy foils. Ruth Donnelly is both tart and peppery as Alvin's harried secretary ("You want to see Mr. Roberts? Oh, you want to sue Mr. Roberts. The line forms on the left.") Allen Jenkins, who keeps saying he's from Chicago even though his Brooklyn accent could be cut with a steak knife, plays a mug sent by his gangster boss to threaten Roberts. In a mind-blowing scene, Alvin terrifies the tough guy with a graphic, horrifying description of death in the electric chair. Tracy plays this monologue with unholy gusto; if you're not opposed to the death penalty, you will be after this. There's a funny scene in which Jenkins has to pass time with Alvin's sweet, clueless mother, who is continually thwarted in her desire to listen to the Bunny Harmon Hour on the radio. The usual suspects fill out the cast, those character actors whose very predictability is their glory: Ned Sparks the perennial gloomy pickle-puss; Frank McHugh the perennial hapless nebbish; Jack La Rue the perennial menacing hoodlum. Director Roy Del Ruth (who also helmed the wildly entertaining BLONDE CRAZY) keeps BLESSED EVENT going like a popcorn-maker; the sly, outrageous zingers just keep coming.

Lee Tracy's career never recovered after he was fired from MGM for a drunken indiscretion committed in Mexico. But I doubt he could have lasted long as a star after the Code anyway, since his films are gleefully amoral, frequently demonstrating that crime—or at least lying, cheating and riding roughshod over other people's feelings—pays. Every Lee Tracy vehicle contains a moment when he realizes he's gone too far, usually when the girl he fancies bursts into tears and tells him off. (Here he crosses the line in a big way when he betrays a desperate young woman who begs him not to reveal her pregnancy.) He looks suddenly abashed, protesting, "Gee, if I'd known you felt that way…I'd give anything not to have done that…Baby, sugar, listen…!" But two second later he's back to his old scheming ways. A reformed Lee Tracy would be like Fred Astaire with arthritis. Not that he isn't a good guy deep down…well, maybe. He has charm, anyway: an impish grin and twinkly eyes and boyish blond hair, like Tom Sawyer crossed with a Tammany Hall fixer. His reactions to sentimentality—to Dick Powell's cloying tenor or Franchot Tone in BOMBSHELL telling Jean Harlow he'd like to run barefoot through her hair—are delicious. He's salt and vinegar, no sweetening. In BLESSED EVENT Alvin has a fit when an editorial calls him the "nadir" of American journalism. Lee Tracy, on the other hand, represents is the zenith of the American newspaper movie.

The main reason people I know won't watch classic movies is because they "move too slow". Everyone I know this all old films are super-long, slow moving affairs with no action. I can't wait to show them Blessed Event.

Blessed Event (1932) is a terrifically fast, hilarious pre-code comedy with it's main character based on 30's tabloid writer Walter Winchell. Lee Tracy plays Alvin Roberts, the main character, who runs the "dirtiest" gossip column in New York, but events ensue that may have to cause him to give up his column.

If you have an opportunity to watch this amazing movie, do so. If you are already a fan of classics you will love it, and even if you've never watched an old movie, this is a great movie for anyone, if you thought all old movies were squeaky clean, slow, boring, and innocent, you're in for a surprise.

"Blessed Event" is a parody of its time and of the media and entertainment of its day including newspapers and radio. But one wonders how exaggerated it really is. The sensationalism of the press and rise of yellow journalism was a frequent part of movie plots in the 1930s. But this one treats of another aspect as well - gossip.

Lee Tracy plays Alvin Roberts, who quickly becomes a famous New York gossip columnist. The movie is billed as a drama and comedy. While there is comedy in Robets' character and some of the funny things he says, the drama of the film isn't lost on the audience. We soon feel the distastefulness of Roberts' gossip column. We soon see the inconsiderate character that he becomes. We soon see his ego and pride and relish for the power he has assumed. These are sad situations, and the film shows the tragic results of such power and behavior. Of course, amidst all of this we have occasional funny lines or clever comments.

This film could be a biopic of a real person. Other reviewers have pointed this out. Roberts is as an obvious copy of Walter Winchell who was then on the rise as the king of gossip. Winchell was the original gossip columnist of Broadway and New York. He rose to such power through the press that politicians, the rich and famous, sports celebrities, gangsters, and actors feared him or tried to get close to him. Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons would become the Walter Winchells of Hollywood.

Lee Tracy's high-pitched voice and rapid-fire delivery closely emulate Winchell's persona. Although carried to the extreme for this film, those also were natural characteristics of Tracy. For a time, he was a leading actor in great demand. Some of his real lifestyle was similar to Winchell's. He was arrogant and seemed to bathe in the power of his position. Tracy also lived a racy, reckless, self-centered life. His temper, rowdiness and bad manners earned him a "bad-boy" reputation. He was given the boot from MGM after a public incidence in Mexico during filming of a movie there. Tracy urinated in public off a balcony and got in fisticuffs with the police.

His later roles about hard-bitten, muck-racking, sensationalist reporters soon wore thin with the public. Tracy returned to the stage and later ended up on television in supporting roles. He had a successful marriage and apparently tamed down before his 1968 death from cancer at age 70.

Winchell's fortunes were quite different. From the mid-1930s on, his star continued to rise through the 1950s. He had his own radio show and his newspaper column was syndicated in more than 2,000 papers worldwide. Winchell was very controversial. He had powerful friends and enemies. He was the first media personality to attack Adolf Hitler and the rise of Nazism. He also hated Communism and attacked the National Maritime Union during World War II as being a communist front. He admired Franklin D. Roosevelt and was invited to the White House. He also liked J. Edgar Hoover. Winchell was one of the earliest and most outspoken supporters of civil rights for African Americans. He attacked the Ku Klux Klan and other racist groups. He also supported Sen. Joseph McCarthy's efforts to ferret out communists in Hollywood.

Winchell held court at the Stork Club in New York for years. But by the late 1950s, his appeal began to wane. And, his power dropped quickly. His family life was unstable and unconventional and experienced sad deaths. He lived alone his last two years in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. He died of cancer at age 74 in 1968.

In this movie, Tracy's Roberts says repeatedly, "Pride ain't power." He has a few funny lines. "I almost starved to death for two weeks," was one. The story is all about so-called "entertainment journalism." The supporting cast are fine, with Mary Brian doing an excellent job as Gladys Price, Roberts' secretary and right-hand man.

This movie is interesting in its snapshot of the time and its parodies. It has some historical value for that reason. The cast and production values are all good. And, it's somewhat entertaining.