Associés sans honneur

I was interested in this film for two reasons - I like Edward G. Robinson very much, and just last year, I saw Marsha Hunt at Paramount's 100th anniversary party, 95 years old, with all her marbles, looking marvelous. It is wonderful to see her here, at the age of 23.

Unholy Partners takes place after World War I, when a newspaper man, Bruce Corey (Robinson) returns from the conflict - but not to his old reporting job. He wants to start a different kind of newspaper -- more of a tabloid, something people can fold over and read easily in the subway. But he doesn't have the money. He approaches a crooked gambler, Merritt Lambert (Edward Arnold) and wins the $250,000 from him that he needs, making them partners. Corey starts the paper along with his secretary (Laraine Day) and an assistant, Tommy (William T. Orr). Conflicts arise when Lambert objects to the investigation of certain stories that involve him.

This is a good film, somewhat melodramatic, with a pretty Hunt singing "After You've Gone" - she had a wonderful voice - as she plays Gail Fenton, who is dating Lambert, but has drawn the interest of Corey's assistant (Orr). If you baby boomers will think back, you may remember that at the end of every TV series produced by Warner Brothers there was the name Wm. T. Orr - Orr became a very successful executive producer. Robinson, Arnold, Day, and Orr are all very good.

This film came out around the same time as Citizen Kane so probably got lost in the shuffle, not that it's anywhere near as good. The interesting thing is they talk about the end of tabloid era. Little did they know that we're still in it, worse than ever.

The paper Corey starts, The New York Mercury, was based on the newspaper The New York Mirror. One of the reviews mentions reading the Sunday funnies. I did too. It was a fun paper.

I saw this movie over twenty years ago, but it remains somewhat more memorable for the speed and sureness of it's directing and acting, particularly the dynamite pairing (I believe the only time it happened) of Robinson and Arnold. Theirs, as it turns out, is an unholy partnership, with Arnold slowly realizing that his control of a major newspaper would give his criminal economic power a tremendous boost, and Robinson slowly realizing the responsibility of a newspaper is more than just ballyhoo and gossip (would that a certain current newspaper tycoon would learn this - but he won't). Inevitably the partnership ends violently, with Robinson left in a very, very peculiar position of knowing too well who killed his partner.

Unfortunately, Mervyn LeRoy's film was smothered in 1941 by Orson Welles' first masterpiece (and greatest film?) CITIZEN KANE. But though Kane does show how a newspaper empire is built (and almost lost) by Kane, that film is actually a look at a flawed "great man", and the problem of how people remember the man's actions. This space is not adequate to go into the plot of KANE (or it's technical brilliance), but one should only note that Charles Foster Kane's ego also involves grasping at a political career aimed at the White House, marrying two women (and losing both of their love for him), building an opera house and failing to control public views on culture, and building a modern version of a pyramid as a final monument to that ego. The many sides of the character of Charley Kane keep our attention with repeated viewings, but such a depth is not found in LeRoy's film. This does not dismiss the LeRoy film as a failure, but relegates it to an entertaining movie only.

The interesting thing is that UNHOLY PARTNERS has (like KANE) a basis in fact. KANE is based (whether Welles admitted it or not) on the life of William Randolph Hearst, with his political interests and his social pretensions. And yes, Susan Alexander is a nasty swipe at poor Marion Davies. But in UNHOLY PARTNERS, the newspaper is based on THE NEW YORK MIRROR, a tabloid that popped up in the 1920s, and lasted into the 1960s (I remember reading it's Sunday comic sections in my first eight years). The newspaper was edited by Phillip Payne, who loved spreading scandalous stories to sell his paper. He also enjoyed ballyhoo - stories about aviators, channel swimmers, murder cases, baseball and football stars, actors and actresses - you did not read THE MIRROR to get an intelligent political viewpoint. He is not known for having any criminal partner, but the Arnold character is clearly based on Arnold Rothstein, the man who fixed the 1919 World Series, and was known as "the big bankroll" being the contact man between Wall Street and the underworld. In 1928 Rothstein was shot to death in a hotel elevator, and the crime was never solved. That same year, like Robinson's character, Payne was killed when a plane he was flying across the Atlantic crashed into it.

This film is not perfect, but it is gritty enough to be real, in the style that is more in keeping with films of the later 40s. The two Edwards play well off each other, and it is a shame that they didn't make more films together. Although it was not a strong film for the female cast, it did give Laraine Day and Marsha Hunt some scope to show they were more than the dolly-birds that many directors took them to be. Call me superstitious, but three of the main cast were born in 1917 and all 3 lived to 2002, with the two lasses still going strong. Perhaps it is a sign that the director chose some strong actors to make this film hum along effectively. As to its portrayal of the paper business, it is highly contemporary in its grasp of how media men prefer to make the news than report it. The very fact that Miss Hunt and her husband, Robert Presnell were allegedly blacklisted for their communist (for this read, Liberal) sympathies in the 1950s is an ironical grasp of the power of the press over any idea of truth or talent over power and influence. Mervyn LeRoy remains an icon of morally strong, but unsentimental film-making in what is often a candy-coated world. 9 Stars.

Fresh from World War I, Edward G. Robinson has all kinds of new ideas about his chosen profession of journalism. But his old newspaper won't see things his way. Not discouraged, but needing cash he gets it from Edward Arnold a gangster with whom he becomes Unholy Partners with.

Although Arnold is at first a silent partner and gives Robinson a free hand with the paper, it's not a partnership that in any way can last. Robinson, and more particularly reporter William T. Orr, starts looking into the activities of Arnold's friends and later Arnold. And then Orr becomes interested in Laraine Day who is a nightclub singer that Arnold has taken a kind of lease out on.

The whole film builds toward the inevitable showdown of Arnold and Robinson and the two really dominate the film, the other players barely getting any innings in their performances. Arnold is a very careful man in maintaining a respectable front and he sees the possibilities in controlling a large media outlet. Not unlike that other Arnold film character from 1941, D.B. Norton from Meet John Doe.

Charles Dingle who is a favorite character actor of mine is in Unholy Partners. But he's in a very subdued role who Arnold has under his thumb by controlling Dingle's gambling debts. Dingle's not at all the arrogant and pompous man he usually plays. And I miss that.

Robinson and Arnold make quite a good pair of matched adversaries. Unholy Partners showed they should have done more work together.

All set up for a rip-roaring hour and a quarter, with Edward G. as the sassy newshound back from the trenches, in partnership with gangster Edward Arnold, surely two of the very greatest. Just watch Robinson outwit Arnold in a poker game for the paper. You know it won't end well. In tow are Laraine Day, who loves the former, as does naïve William T. Orr, an aspiring newspaperman who still has all his ideals intact.

It goes more or less as you'd expect, but with MGM glitz and taste rather than Warners energy. Which means it's 20 minutes too long, and with a weird drawn-out ending tacked on for no particularly good reason, and you go away after 95 minutes feeling less than satisfied. Someone shudda told those guys at MGM, class ain't everything.