Ladrão Com Alma

The title character is a mutt, and the story comes from the flamboyant pen of Damon Runyon. That's hardly the recipe for a moody, offbeat crime story, but Robert Florey, perhaps drawing on his French roots, adds that little je ne sais quoi and comes up with a casserole a cut above the ordinary. It's not quite a success but an honorable and occasionally arresting try.

Runyon is best remembered for his sentimental yarns about Broadway, that garish gulch that disrupts Manhattan's tidy grid - stories of gold-diggers and raffish sportsmen, of old silver-tongued sots and big bruisers with 24-karat hearts. But he told more downbeat tales as well, as evidenced by Johnny One-Eye, where Florey more skillfully modulates the movie's dark tonality than did Irving Reis in The Big Street, with Lucille Ball and Henry Fonda, another of Runyon's more shadowed stories (perhaps Reis was overruled by Runyon, who acted as producer).

Save for Pat O'Brien, Florey's smallish cast is nowhere near the caliber of The Big Street's (its next most recognizable member is Wayne Morris). Partners in petty crime years ago, O'Brien and Morris whacked a double-crosser and tossed his body off the Staten Island ferry. Since then they've drifted apart and gone legit, with O'Brien now occupying a pinnacle not only on Park Avenue but in the city's power structure as well.

We get only a brief glimpse of his affluence and influence, however, in a scene where he brings hookers to his penthouse to pair off with politicos. An epicene blackmailer (Lawrence Cregar) working for Morris cuts short the festivities by calling down a police raid. O'Brien flees out into the city's meaner streets with only one mission - to find Morris and exact his revenge. He catches a bullet along the way, and holes up in a condemned brownstone in the Village, where he meets up with the poor mutt, Johnny One-Eye.

Here the plotting plummets into the, well, Runyonesque. The dog belongs to the little girl of Morris' mistress (Dolores Moran), thus becoming the canine link which fatally reunites the old partners. Enough said, except to note that the tot (Gayle Reed) will harden the warmest of hearts, suggesting the least endearing attributes of Shirley Temple as Little Miss Marker, another of Runyon's creations.

Florey can't quite toss out all the aggressively poignant slop - if he had, there would have little left to work with - but he accentuates the noirish elements (he had just directed John Payne in The Crooked Way, one of his more solid credits). During O'Brien's wounded, nocturnal flight, the skyscrapers loom like jagged black precipices. And the scenes in the abandoned town house, where he's visited by the little girl, bring to mind, in their sense of menacing isolation in the middle of a teeming city, Ted Tetzlaff's The Window, a hit of the previous year. (There's also a freighted scene with a boozing veterinarian that looks forward to a similar one in Andre De Toth's Crime Wave four years later.) Sad that Florey was relegated to nothing better than the Bs (even to the Bs among the Bs); given better material and looser budgets, his distinctive touch might have grown into a major talent.

I like film noir--you know, told old gangster films from the 40s and 50s. This Damon Runyan story has almost all the earmarks of a good film noir movie...most. However, it also involves a cute kid and a schmaltzy storyline--something you'd NEVER find in a true example of noir.

When the film begins, two hoods, Cory (Wayne Morris) and Martin (Pat O'Brien) chase down a guy who stole $50,000 from them. In the process of getting it back, they are forced to shoot the guy. Years pass and the two crooks have gone separate ways. Martin has an aura of respectability about him and Cory is still a hood--a hood with a girlfriend who has a kid, Elsie. When someone goes to the police with information about the killing which occurred at the beginning of the film, Cory decides to rat on his old friend and offers to testify against him to save his butt. Not surprisingly, Martin is furious and is out to kill Cory when he finds out he's being betrayed.

All this sounds like perfect noir--a killing, betrayal and revenge. However, Elsie soon becomes involved in the case and the dopey kid thinks that Martin is Santa...yes, Santa. She tries to help him-- not only because of this but because her soon to be step-daddy is a sadist who beat her cute little dog. Even Martin isn't cold enough to do that and soon takes the pup under his care. What's next? Well, it ain't exactly kid-friendly and is interesting but the whole subplot involving the kid tended to take away the hard edge from this one--and I WANT a hard-edged story! All in all, not a bad film but also one that isn't exactly the best from the two stars. Without the kid and the dog, the story would have been a lot better.

In New York City, rich and respectable Park Avenue ex-gangster Pat O'Brien (as Martin Martin) finds out guttery ex-partner Wayne Morris (as Dane Cory) is planning to go straight to the D.A. and squeal about the events surrounding the film's opening. As this would put Mr. O'Brien behind bars and get Mr. Morris off easily, the two men have a nasty confrontation. O'Brien takes a bullet in the shoulder, and goes on the lam. A "WANTED" man, O'Brien makes his way into the Greenwich Village neighborhood where Morris keeps an apartment for busty blonde Dolores Moran (as Lily White)...

Ms. Moran lives with her illiterate - but smartly talkative - daughter Gayle Reed (as Elsie) and their dog "Skipper". Morris likes to make time with Ms. Moran, but loathes little girl cuteness and furry animals; he wants the kid sent to school, then kicks and wounds "Skipper". The disabled canine meets O'Brien, who names him "Johnny One-Eye". Next, O'Brien meets little Miss Reed. O'Brien tells the gullible girl he's really "Santa Claus". This was based on a story by Damon Runyon, but hacks out his whimsy. Highlights include authentic New York locations and a velvety-voiced supporting cast.

**** Johnny One-Eye (5/5/50) Robert Florey ~ Pat O'Brien, Wayne Morris, Dolores Moran, Gayle Reed

Despite the film's original storyline, director Robert Florey, who was well past his prime when this low-budget programmer was made, does injustice to a very original Damon Runyon's plot idea. An innocent but plucky young girl naively believes that a criminal fugitive (Pat O'Brien) who's hiding out in a deserted building in her neighborhood, is really Santa Claus. She keeps his presence secret and does her best to help him. Florey fills the story with bathos and saccharine sentimentality involving the title character, the girl's little dog, and the film ultimately becomes mired in its own mawkishness.

More than a decade later Bryan Forbes would direct a critically-acclaimed film based on a similar premise. In 1961's WHISTLE DOWN THE WIND, youngster Hayley Mills mistakenly believes fugitive wife-murderer Alan Bates, who is hiding out from the authorities in the barn on her father's isolated British farm, to be Jesus Christ. The tact and taste with which Forbes handles the material is a paradigm of understatement and restraint. Although Mary Hayley Bell's (mother of Hayley} narrative was lauded at the time for its great originality, the plot premise appears cribbed from this unpretentious Damon Runyon B-film programmer.

When I looked up Damon Runyon on Wikipedia before writing this comment, I could find no reference to this story or this film. This has to be the most obscure Damon Runyon story ever put on film.

As surely as Mark Twain is accepted as the chronicler of life on the Mississippi, Damon Runyon is his counterpart for life on the most famous street of all, Broadway in New York City. His characters whether he writes seriously or for comedy are a part of New York, they could not exist in any other environment.

Johnny One-Eye is one of his serious and more obscure works. Old time gangster Pat O'Brien and Wayne Morris have done their share of bad things, but now have risen to some respectability. But when a hot shot prosecutor starts breathing down Morris's neck, he's ready to feed him O'Brien. That O'Brien won't have and when he confronts Morris, he's forced to shoot and kill one of Morris's gunsills. O'Brien is wounded himself.

The wounded gangster is befriended by a little girl and her badly injured dog who has only one good eye. O'Brien has quite an interesting 24 hours before all is resolved.

The film it bares the most resemblance to that I've seen is Odd Man Out. O'Brien certainly found a few more friends than James Mason did in his injured state though.

Sad to say that this film is a cheaply made independent film with not so great production values. That's made up by the location shooting in New York a la Naked City. Look for a good performance by Dolores Moran as the showgirl mother of the little girl befriending O'Brien.

Fans of Damon Runyon might want to give this one a look.