Thieves Fall Out

... one of them is interesting. Nor do they all really mesh.

I have noticed that many of the movies falling into the "hicks nix sticks pix" type have rather complicated legal and financial transactions at their center. This one is about a legacy -- and how and why not to sell one.

How many people in 1941 knew what that even meant? Eddie Albert, always a likable performer, is the one who sells one. It's his mother's but there is a clause allowing for him to get money while she's still alive if he marries and ... Oh, forget it. That is another plot. He gets married.

He buys a company. He doesn't tell his father. He doesn't tell his father-in-law.

His grandmother, Jane Darwell, tries to help the young couple out. And she gets into quite a pickle herself.

This is neither fish nor fowl. It isn't especially funny. It isn't really romantic. And it's one of those movies in which gangsters are adorable bumbling and ostensibly cute.

As a post script, the two gangsters in question have a couple sequences that presage the two in "The Big Combo." I'm sure Anthony Quinn, who plays the boss, didn't know this. It may have been subliminal even. But it's there.

Jane Darwell as Grandma Allen sure stole the show in this old black and white rags to riches story from 1941. Darwell had just won the Oscar for playing Ma Joad in Grapes of Wrath. Robert Barnes (Alan Hale) and Ed Barnes (Eddie Albert) are father and son, in this love story and mistaken identity caper, with Grandma helping things along. Joan Leslie is Mary, the blushing bride, along for the ride. Even a young Anthony Quinn as "Collins" the thug. Blossom, the laughing maid, is played by Etta McDaniel, sister of Hattie. Looks like the McDaniel sisters only worked together once in "Stella Dallas" in 1937. Alan Hale, who usually played the old, gruff sea salt, made 235 films, starting in 1911. Eddie Albert's biggest movie was Roman Holiday in 1953 and of course he played "Oliver" in the Green Acres TV series. He had only been in films for three years when he made "Thieves Fall Out". Any flick that has the good guys trying to outwit the bad guys has to have inept cops, and Edward Brophy and Edward Gargan are here, playing their usual roles.

Eddie Albert wants to marry Joan Leslie, start his own business, and get out from under the thumb of his blustery, obnoxious father, Alan Hale. His only asset is a legacy, but he doesn't inherit it until his mother, Minna Gombell, dies. At the urging of his grandmother, Jane Darwell, he sells the legacy at a steep discount to Hobart Cavanaugh. He sells it to gangster Anthony Quinn. He offers to sell it back to Albert, lest something unfortunate happen to his mother.

Like other Warner comedies in this period, it is frantic rather than funny, made from conflicts born out of obnoxious stereotypes. Among the worst is Miss Gombell, who is loud and hysterical at all times. Hale is permanently grouchy. Albert is working between his nice guy/sap character, and when MissLeslie walks out on him, as the wife invariably does in movies like this, it's in a fit of hysteria.

It's hard to care for any of these characters, and that means we aren't invested in what happens to them. Add in dumb cops played by Eddie Brophy and Edward Gargan, a minor appearance by John Litel as a plant manager, and the most sympathetic character might well be Anthony Quinn. True, he's willing to bump off ladies, but Miss Gombell wouldn't be much of a loss, and for him it's only business, like the way other businessmen behave here, only without the threat of homicide, which quickly recedes anyway.

What a nice surprise. This is the type of Warner Brothers early forties broad comedy that tends to meander and never find itself. "Thieves Fall Out" does just the opposite. After a walk-up start, it works into a trot and then a gallop with the laughs coming from a twisty, lovably nutty plot and a riotously broad performance from Jane Darwell (Ma Joad, and "Mary Poppins" 's bird lady).

Eddie Albert wants a raise from his employer and father, Alan Hale, so that he can afford to marry Joan Leslie, the daughter of Hale's chief competitor in the mattress business. Jane Darwell, as Eddie's gangster-obsessed Grandma (and arch-nemesis of her son-in-law, Hale) schemes with Eddie to sell his legacy, a hundred thousand dollars which he will inherit when his mother dies, so that he can buy a factory his father's business depends upon and go into business for himself. When the legacy winds up in the hands of gangster Anthony Quinn, Eddie's mother (the joyfully overacting Minna Gombell) finds herself trembling in the crosshairs.

That's a darned funny set-up, and once we get there, we're off and running.

Nice guy Eddie Albert's no Eddie Bracken, at least laugh-wise, and Joan Leslie's great potential as a comedienne was not yet realized in 1941. The often hysterically funny Alan Hale is underused, too, especially in his comic battles with his mother-in-law, Darwell, which could have carried this thing for an hour. There's also an obnoxious Reggie Mantle-type rival for Eddie that we don't get a lot out of. The rivalry between the two in-law mattress kings doesn't get us much.

None of that matters, because with Darwell's blustering buttinskyism the film finds its stroke and never loses it. With snappy dialogue and a gun moll spirit, she is pitted against virtually every member of the cast in one scene after another, and the sparks fly. She brings it all in for a landing right on time.

The title, incidentally, comes from an old proverb: "When thieves fall out, honest men come by their own." I looked it up for ya.

Fast-paced family comedy similar to what Disney produced in the 50's and 60's. Very likeable cast includes Eddy Arnold, Jane Darwell, Alan Hale. Son of a mattress factory owner buys his own factory and gets involved with gangsters (Anthony Quinn and Frank Faylen!). If you don't like feisty, wise-cracking grandma's (Jane Darwell hams it up), skip it; otherwise, quite enjoyable.