Anjos da Broadway

Popular writer Ben Hecht certainly was no stranger to the Broadway cornucopia of gangsters, molls, hoofers, & sharpies and mixes them all in a non-glamorous look at the Great White Way.

Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. in a bit of offbeat casting plays Bill O'Brien, Broadway sharpie who thinks he's latched on to a sure thing in steering rube John Qualen into a fixed poker game. Qualen however is not a millionaire. Fairbanks has it all wrong, Qualen doesn't have money, he's embezzled $3000.00 from his employer and is thinking of suicide. Fairbanks ain't as sharp as he thinks, but with the help of inebriated playwright Thomas Mitchell he tries to bluff his way through the gangsters and turn a profit.

Always appealing to Fairbanks's better nature is Rita Hayworth who does a good job of arousing the noble and the carnal at the same time. She's not Queen of Columbia pictures yet, just a crown princess. But Hayworth is just magnificent in this part.

Thomas Mitchell is always given kudos for his part and they are deserved, but one who's not talked about is John Qualen. Qualen had a fine run of character parts in his long career of little men constantly being victimized. He started that cycle with The Front Page and continues it on with Muley in The Grapes of Wrath and now this part in Angels Over Broadway. He was a fine, but underrated actor and another favorite of John Ford.

It's worth it just to see Rita Hayworth as always and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. with that New York City accent.

It is so easy to write off beauty as the reason an actress achieves great rank in Hollywood, and it is what also plagued Marilyn Monroe - the desperate need to be taken seriously for your talent rather than your looks once you have become famous for beauty alone.

I myself had never given Rita Hayworth props for anything other than her luminous visual persona. So it was with great delight that I came across this exceptional film, with its screwball comedy timing and humor, and its amazing ensemble casting - from a sleazy but compelling performance by Douglas Fairbanks Jr. To the ironic portrayal of the has-been drunk played to iconic perfection by Thomas Mitchell.

But the two real gems are John Qualen as a suicidal bookkeeper who is the target of a 2 bit mob scam, and Rita Hayworth - in a portrayal as exceptional to me as Rosalind Russell in The Front Page, or Marilyn Monroe in 7 Year Itch - plays a star-struck wanna-be who is barely making it in shady circumstances, yet manages to convey tremendous innocence and idealism in spite of her deeply compromised situation.

The most striking thing to me of all is how uncanny it is to watch what one would consider to be a classic Monroe performance coming from an actress seven years prior to Marilyn having been given her first on screen part. Suddenly I felt like I understood how Marilyn had crafted her persona - hours of sitting in darkened theaters watching Rita Hayworth concoct her brilliant magic of innocence and seduction like it was real and not a carefully crafted act.

In my humble opinion, I don't believe Marilyn would have been nearly as iconic had she not had Rita Hayworth's example to follow, and this portrayal in Angels Over Broadway is the link that, to me, irrefutably proves my point! What an amazing, under-appreciated work of group talent and screen writing art! Rita is poignantly brilliant and her performance ranks for me with Robert Williams in Platinum Blonde for great, naturalistic acting that lasts through time.

1940's "Angels Over Broadway" is actually a little play on words, since the name of one of the main characters is Engle, which in German means Angel (actually spelled Engel).

Written by Ben Hecht, the film stars Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Rita Hayworth, Thomas Mitchell and John Qualen. It's an interesting and sweet film with very good performances, but you would swear it's based on a play because it is extremely heavy on dialogue.

The story concerns four people who wind up joining forces: a wheeler dealer named Bill O'Brien (Fairbanks Jr.), a suicidal man, Engle (Qualen), a lonely performer, Nina (Hayworth) and a drunken playwright, Eugene Gibbons (Mitchell).

Engle needs to come up with $3,000 by morning that he embezzled; O'Brien thinks Engle is a rich sucker; Nina is looking to meet someone successful; and Gibbons has written another flop. They all are in the same nightclub.

While intoxicated, Gibbons learns Engle's sad story and is determined to help him. His first move - taking back a piece of $12,000 jewelry from his girlfriend -- does not work as, after he takes it, she tells him it's paste.

O'Brien had planned to bring Gibbons to a poker game so he could lose a lot of money to thugs and O'Brien could earn a bonus. However, it is decided that Engle should go instead and skip out after winning the initial money that the players will allow him to win to draw him into a false sense of luck.

Nina goes along, interested in O'Brien, even after she finds out he's broke.

One of the most amusing aspects of the film is that everyone - including the mobsters - knows who the Gibbons character is. They all say,"Oh, yeah, you're the playwright."

Anyone who has ever watched "Jeopardy" knows that today, no one knows current playwrights by name or face, let alone current plays.

The film is interesting as well because is that although this is really four individual stories, the plots converge so that the film is not in the least episodic.

Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. Is marvelous as usual. The man could be the most elegant of British gentlemen or a born and bred New York low-life. Here he is the latter and a delight.

I am so glad a previous comment mentioned Marilyn Monroe - she must have been influenced by Hayworth in this film, as Hayworth's voice and delivery in spots can only be described as pre-Marilyn. Monroe couldn't have had a better role model. Hayworth is just beautiful and gives a sympathetic portrayal of Nina.

Mitchell's performance is heartrending, especially when he calls his wife on the telephone. Qualen has precious little dialogue but he, too, does a great job as a desperate man.

Definitely recommended for the acting and the structure of the film, which is masterful.

This early Rita Hayworth movie shows off her more youthful charms of innocence and good will. She was not yet a femme fatale or a glamour queen, although she does get an opportunity for a brief dance. She was born Margarita ('Rita') Cansino in a family of dancers, so she could dance before she could act, and made numerous film appearances as Rita Cansino before she was reinvented by Columbia Studios. This film has never been released on DVD so I had to buy an old video to see it. It is written, produced, and directed by Ben Hecht, and describes Hecht's Broadway of that era. The unlikely casting of glamour boy Douglas Fairbanks Junior as a small-time chiseller is a surprise. He does tolerably well but is no genius at it. Thomas Mitchell plays an inebriated playwright who five years ago won the Pulitzer Prize but is now a flop. Well, that's Broadway! Or was! I am referring to a time, of course, when they still had plays on Broadway, and not just musicals. Yes, believe it or not, way back in the Stone Age there was something called drama on the Great White Way, but only mastodons and plesiosaurs (got my geological eras mixed up, but who cares) remember it. The film features a fine performance from sad-sack character actor John Qualen as 'Charles Engle', a rather obvious pun on the title of the film, 'Engel' being German for angel. The film is very heavy on dialogue and somewhat preachy, but Hecht's dialogue is interesting and often extremely witty, so even though it is longer than a modern 'text message', it is worth listening to. The film was made, after all, before attention spans shrank to five seconds. The story is rather contrived and corny, and lurches rather heavily in the direction of Moral Messages. Well, good for Hecht, he was trying to get some messages across, rather than just titillate. So he was a bit clumsy at it. The film is still very good and well worth watching. And there is the irresistible Rita to gaze at, in wonder and awe. Sometimes you just want to give her a hug, don'tcha?

This had a very interesting beginning, really getting my attention, but then bogged down way too much, mainly with Thomas Mitchell's inebriated rantings. (Anyone ever notice how many drunks and loud-and-obnoxious characters Mitchell played?)

The writers also gave Rita Hayworth some sappy dialog as she tried to be Douglas Fairbanks' girl. But, I wasn't complaining looking at the young, innocent-and-gorgeous looking Hayworth. Wow - hubba, hubba!

The story, however, does pick up with the card game and then finishes strong. John Qualen is good as the mousy man who really is at the center of this story. He may not be the 'name' actor the others are here, but he is the real star of this movie.