Now I'll Tell

Just saw this film at a private screening - based on the life of a real gangster - featuring a young "Spence" who is absolutely dynamite. He plays a charming scoundrel who works his way up financially within the underworld via running a gambling joint - fixing fights helping wealthy businessmen out of fixes, etc. And Alice Faye is "Harlowlike" in her second screen role. If you like or love Spencer Tracy - this is a must see film. Sadly, the film survives from a pieced together reconstruction - based on a work print - and thus is a little rough around the edges - with numerous splices which mars some of the dialogue. Nonetheless - a real treat.

Spencer Tracy stars as Murray Golden, a compulsive gambler who is very good at his craft. Virginia (Helen Twelvetrees) is inexplicably in love with him and agrees to marry him. However, most of their marriage, Murray is gambling or running around with his floozy, Peggy (Alice Faye)...yet still Virginia loves him and listens to his many promises he never keeps. At one point, he promises to stop gambling when he makes $200,000...and doesn't. Then, he amasses nearly $650,000 during the 1910s...and yet he doesn't quit. It's obvious Murray is hooked and can't stop and this will end up being the case until he falls flat on his face...which, ultimately, has to happen. You just can't winning or cheating on your wife forever, can you?

There is a major problem with this film that keeps it from being a really good film. Despite good acting (after all, it stars Spencer Tracy), the main character is despicable...no two ways about it. He is an amoral liar...and how can they expect the audience to care about him in the least?! To make things worse, the ending drags on WAY too long.

"Now I'll Tell You" was a bit familiar and a bit of a rerun. It mirrored several gambler/gangster movies of that era. The formula is known. A gambler starts small, makes it big, and takes a fall.

Murray Golden (Spencer Tracy) was a small-time gambler who was as crooked as the day is long. If he could fix a fight, a race, or a roulette wheel, he would do it. He started as a nickel-and-dime gambler and worked is way up to a big shot.

He was also lucky. And he attributed his luck to his gilded wife, Virginia (Helen Twelvetrees). She was in love with Murray, and even though she disdained his lifestyle, she couldn't leave him. He kept her stored away in a nice apartment while he tended to his gambling and catted around with his side piece Peggy Warren (Alice Faye). Virginia was so tucked away and so trusting that the entire outside world knew about Peggy while Virginia was clueless. Peggy was his outside woman, whom he saw more of than his own wife, while Virginia was his homebound woman whom he could not dispense with. As much as he lied to and cheated on Virginia, he would do anything for her (except stop cheating and gambling).

That's always a funny line: "I'll do anything for you." Most of the time the people who say that don't fully mean it. Like the Meatloaf lyrics:

"I'll do anything for love, but I won't do that."

Golden would do anything for Virginia except the two things she wanted most of all for him to do. I guess love has its limits.

"Now I'll Tell You" wasn't anything special. It was fairly rote and lacked anything distinguishable. Fox Film Corp went with a flat movie that was probably considered safe and easy. Spencer Tracy isn't going to float anyone's boat, but he was a known face, and Helen Twelvetrees (the little we saw of her) was more of a second tier actress; recognizable enough, but not a very big star. If there was any good reason to watch this movie, it was for the sixty seconds or so of Shirley Temple. Who can resist her smile?

Free on Odnoklassniki.

This is supposed to be the story of the life of Arnold Rothstein, gangster and gambler, who was killed over a gambling debt in 1928, with the name changed to "Murray Golden", and played by Spencer Tracy. Except it plays fast and very loose with the truth. There were several versions of this story told during the early era of talking film besides this one, the best known being "Street of Chance" starring William Powell and "The Czar of Broadway" with John Wray in the title role.

Spencer Tracy played tough guys in the precode era before he ever got to MGM, but he always brought quite a bit of empathy to even the hardest guy he played, and this role is no exception. The film has Murray Golden starting out small with small cons at a racetrack, eventually opening a high class gambling house where he starts to make the big dough, and then he gets into fixing sporting events, with one particularly tragic event being portrayed on screen.

All the while he considers his wife, Virginia (Helen Twelvetrees), to be his good luck piece. But she is just a bird in a gilded cage. She has no friends because Murray doesn't want her mixing with the kind of people he deals with and nice people stay at arms length, they have no children, and Virginia just sits home alone night after night.

The main struggle running through the film is the antagonistic relationship Murray Golden has with Al Mossiter (Robert Gleckler), a fellow gambler. This feud starts when Mossiter claims he has been cheated in Golden's gambling house. The end result is Golden making Mossitor look like a fool and a coward even though Golden pays Mossiter his gambling losses.

Mossiter loses his mistress to Golden (Alice Faye in a very early role), and loses every gambling encounter with Golden until Golden's luck runs out, specifically, his wife runs out. The film really sentimentalizes Golden's end in a way that is pure fiction, but it IS some clever Hollywood writing.

With Hobart Cavanaugh as Golden's long time superstitious associate who looks like he would be more at home running a country store, Henry O'Neill as Golden's childhood friend who grew up to be a cop and is the only one who can tell it to Golden straight, and Shirley Temple in a bit part as O'Neill's daughter.

Regardless of the antecedents of plot to actual persons living or dead, this film exudes power from the performances, especially those of Spencer Tracy and his wife in film, Helen Twelvetrees, the latter rather a forgotten star for a brief period in the early 1930's; the famous Tracy intensity glows off his performance as a incorrigible gambler, whose charge comes from the challenge, not the win, and who neglects his wife in so many ways--among them an almost public fling with Alice Faye; the latter home-town blonde of the late 1930's here as a blowsy, blonde-out-of-a-bottle good time girl who creates a permanent rift in Tracy's marriage. For film fans, there is a delightful cast of vintage character actors, Hobart Cavanaugh being a particular standout, and little Miss Shirley Temple making a brief appearance kissing her Daddy The Honest Judge goodnight. Twelvetrees is handed the heavy melodrama, but handles most of it well, particularly as the plot develops, exuding a sort of Lillian Gish quality of loving forgiveness. Yes, it's pre-code melodrama, and most of the plot can be predicted, but I found the honesty of the performances and the interaction of the characters, mixed with a good deal of local color (street performers, brassy night club singers, boxers on the take) made the film fascinating, if not a classic. One hopes that the Fox archives will get ahold of it and make a decent print--and release it in a box of early Spencer Tracy at Fox films.