The New Pictures, Sep. 7, 1942

The Big Street (RKO-Radio) is a pleasant bit of paranoia that cannot possibly displease anyone, but may baffle some cinemaddicts for a while. It is also the first of Damon Runyon’s homely tales about Times Square to be produced by him.

When Her Highness (Lucille Ball), an imperious nightclub queen, gets publicly slapped downstairs and fetches up at the bottom hopelessly crippled, it looks as if she or Author-Producer Damon Runyon were crazy. It turns out that she is. A doctor explains that Her Highness is a paranoiac, which means, he says, that she wants to be what she can’t be, and if she can’t be, she will die. So Pinks (Henry Fonda), a lovelogged busboy, takes care of her.

Pinks feeds her on leftover champagne and caviar from the nightclub where he works. He plays butler for her, trundles her all the way from Manhattan to Miami in her wheel chair, plants her in the path of the playboy she is trailing. Risking a 20-year jail turn, Pinks blackmails the crook who slapped her (Barton MacLane) into a one-night loan of a nightclub (complete with Ozzie Nelson), stages a blowout to bolster Her Highness’ fading delusions of grandeur. To cap the climax, Pinks appears in full dress, and Her Highness sees him for the first time as he really is. Galvanized by his love (and hers), she dances a few miraculous steps with him only to die, happy, in his arms.

This harmless charade has a certain honky-tonk charm for which those who liked Damon Runyon’s Butch Minds the Baby will be warmly prepared. The talk is the patented Runyon brand of Times Square Swahili, in which a worn-out race horse is “practically mucilage,” and marriage is described as “one room, two chins, three kids.” There is the usual Runyon corps de ballet of ham-hearted grifters, heisters and passers, played by a friendly crowd of veterans from Hollywood (Eugene Pallette, Louise Beavers) and Broadway (Sam Levene, Millard Mitchell). Carefully solemn Henry Fonda has the dignity of a wax grape of wrath among satiated little foxes. Pretty Lucille Ball, who was born for the parts Ginger Rogers sweats over, tackles her “emotional” role as if it were sirloin and she didn’t care who was looking. There is also a headwaiter played by sinister, saturnine Hans Conried. He packs so much cold, superb style into his half minute that he makes everybody else’s fun look forced.

Good shot: Miss Ball, crippled and propped up in bed, trying to do a conga from the hips up. She does it very nicely.

Hollywood’s best bet on why Damon Runyon became a producer is that he glumly watched Mark Hellinger move up from script writing to producing, swore that he could do anything Hellinger could do and do it better. At first he so loathed California that his wife bet him a dozen of his famed cacophonous Charvet ties that he wouldn’t last four weeks. He stuck it out five months at RKO, signed a contract with 20th Century-Fox, and has since become, in most respects, an acclimated if eccentric Hollywoodsman.

Runyon is the community champ at gin rummy. He never drinks, loves to eat, spends every available hour holding levees at Mike Lyman’s restaurant on Vine Street. He is inordinately proud 1) of the fact that nobody has ever paid a check while he was at the table, 2) of his ties (people on the lot swear he wore a new one, each louder than the last, every day for five months), 3) of a wire from his good friend Lord Beaverbrook: “Thanks for the ties. They ought to get me more attention in my present work. Max.”

Runyon’s prime beefs about living in Hollywood are that he has to pay his own telegraph tolls on his syndicated column, and that he has to get up early. He has a mole’s dislike of daylight and fresh air. His office windows and shades are in perpetual blackout, and on the set this summer he wore, even on the hottest days, an ankle-length suede overcoat, griped mildly but continuously at every intrusive breeze.

Unlike many producers, Runyon leaves the technical jobs to those who understand them. He develops no stomach ulcers by throwing around his employers’ money. He keeps well within his budget. He does most of his real work—endless attention to details of wardrobe, characterization, dialogue—alone, at night. He is calm. He stays out of Director Irving Reis’s hair. When Runyon kidnapped smart young Director Reis from RKO’s low-budget Falcon series, he took Reis to Manhattan, walked him through four solid hours of old friends (Mike Jacobs, bookies, shirtmakers, etc.), then said: “Good night. I think you can direct the picture now.”

Reis attributes Runyon’s success as a producer to the fact that he is an incurable, archetypical film addict: “He sees every scene through the lay eyes of the average audience, unburdened by any technical knowledge.”

If Reis is right, The Big Street should be a howling success. Runyon has seen it at least 100 times. No matter how familiar he is with the tear-jerker scenes, he can still be relied on to cough loudly into his handkerchief or to grope on the floor for an imaginary object, in order to be alone with thoughts too deep for public tears. One day he saw it with the “Deathwatch,” a group of sound, camera and musical technicians who are so-called because they have no interest in, or comment to make on, any film as entertainment. “Gee, Irving,” he said to Reis, “It didn’t play so good today, did it?”