Cinema: New Picture, Oct. 4, 1943

Thank Your Lucky Stars (Warner), the most crowded constellation Warner Bros, has ever assembled, surrounds Eddie Cantor with such newcomers to song & dance as Bette Davis, Humphrey Bogart, John Garfield, Ida Lupino, Ann Sheridan, Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland. Dinah Shore, Joan Leslie, Dennis Morgan and Alexis Smith, who know their way around in this sort of work, help out. Veteran comics S. Z. Sakall and Edward Everett Horton help still more. But the picture is most amusing as a sort of glorified Amateur Night.

The story requires Mr. Cantor to portray himself as a Pandora’s box of stale jokes, an egomaniac with whom Messrs. Horton & Sakall traffic only because he owns Dinah Shore, who is essential to a Monster Benefit they want to stage. Their problem: to pull for the Shore without shipping too much Cantor. They fail, and Mr. Cantor, taking charge, develops such old-fashioned ideas for the show as that of dressing the chorus-girls as boiled potatoes and having them dive into a tank of sour cream.

Mr. Cantor also plays a Hollywood guide whose lifelong tragedy, cheating him of a screen career, is his resemblance to Eddie Cantor. This damaged soul lives among others of Hollywood’s lumpenproletariat in Gower Gulch, a sort of surrealist Hooverville. Eventually the true Cantor is kidnapped by Gower Gulch Indians who adopt him into the tribe for the benefit of a LIFE photographer (flatteringly misrepresented by Joan Leslie). At the climax of the Monster Benefit the false Cantor impersonates the man he hates most in the world, the true Cantor. Meanwhile the true Cantor suffers as he has suffered for years: Indians tie him up, tomahawk him; maple syrup falls on his bare feet, dogs of all sizes lick it off; a covey of surgeons, to whom he tries to explain his predicament, go to work on him under the impression that he is insane.

This grim study is most notably relieved by:

>Dinah Shore, singing Thank Your Lucky Stars, The Dreamer, and How Sweet You Are.

>Hattie McDaniel, whose bubbling, blaring good humor more than redeems the roaring bad taste of a Harlem number called Ice Cold Katie. > Ann Sheridan, as an experienced college girl, explaining in song, to a bevy of hastily dry-cleaned doves, “why every window has a window shade” and why “there’s no partition in a davenport.”

> Errol Flynn, singing and swaggering a neat Cockney period act, That’s What You Jolly Well Get.

> Olivia de Havilland, Ida Lupino and George Tobias (pinch-hitting for Humphrey Bogart, who was scared to involve himself in so unrefined an act) yowling and prancing through a frenzied, nightmarish parody of The Dreamer and the whole hierarchy of “dream” songs.

Best of all is a madly burlesqued finale in which the giant company wades knee-deep in lyrical steam, Jack Carson and Alan Hale pick their way through the mob in a canoe, and orbic Hattie McDaniel presides on high, enthroned on a crescent moon. The show’s lyrics, by Frank Loesser, are the wildest lashings of tongue-in-cheek since Ring Lardner’s.Sample (from Bette Davis’ protestation of ever lasting faithfulness to the armed forces):I’ll never, never fail ya While you are in Australia, Or out in the Aleutians, Or off among the Rooshians, And flying over Egypt, Your heart will never be gypped, And when you get to India, I’ll still be what I’ve been to ya. I’ve looked the field over And lo and behold! They’re either too young or too old!*

Gower Gulch is not a fiction. Although nothing like Warner Bros.’ moonlit version, it is one of Hollywood’s minor but more durable institutions.

The heart of the so-called Gulch is a mid-Hollywood bar called Brewer’s, on Sunset Boulevard just around the corner from Gower Street. Gower is a buzzing side street which was once the nervous bazaar of a swarm of shoestringers and desperate hams. In the old days it was Hollywood’s famed Poverty Row. Gower’s Gulch is the natural descendant. Today it houses Columbia Studios and, a little further downstreet, RKO. Recently CBS, whose new building adorns the neighborhood, tried to rename the Gulch Columbia Square, with no success.

Brewer’s looks like any middle-grade bar with a blue bakelite façade, thick curtains, chromium trimmed leather booths, and no hint of what goes on there until you see the proprietress. A small, dark woman named Eleanor Lathrop, she is known as “the little mother of Gower Gulch,” and she has a wise, world-saturated mien.

Demigods and Demiglories. For ten years Brewer’s has been the official gathering place for Western extras and bit men, whiskery old boys who are still vicariously chasing aborigines with General Custer, discarded circus clowns and weary stuntmen who congregate to drink beer and to execute competitive embroideries on the small glories of a past day. Demigods like Gene Autry, Bob Steele and Rex Bell drop in now & then. Nearly all the Western stars have been reflected in the booze there at one time or another, but the roster of names which have been most conspicuous and most chronic during the past decade includes Handlebar Hank Bell, Bear Valley Charley, Vinegar Roan, Tex Cooper, Foxy Callaghan, Curley Rucker.

Most of these men started as genuine cowboys. All of them fill the wide-open spaces between the horses in horse operas with masculine strength and silence. Many of them get an occasional line. Perhaps the most prosperous is Handlebar Hank, who owes his modest fortune as well as his name to his mustache. More often than not, these men and others like them are picked up by studios making Westerns without working through Central Casting —a dubious practice known as “casting off the street.”

Homicide and Dogolatry. During the past four or five years the Gulch has twice made news: once with a shooting, once with an election. The shooting is mentioned only in shrouded tones, but it seems that one Blackjack Ward, irritated by nobody quite remembers what, drew a gun on one Johnny Tykes, chased him out of Brewer’s across the street into a parking lot, and killed him much in the manner of the melodramas from which both had earned their beers. Blackjack was acquitted; the boys at Brewer’s testified that he had acted in self-defense.

But the boys at Brewer’s would rather talk about the 1939 election in which Jack Evans, a salt-&-peppery veteran of 25 years in Westerns, beat out Rube Dalroy, a full-bearded, booted ex-circus clown and rider with Buffalo Bill, for the whimsical honor of being Mayor of Gower Gulch. The campaign was promoted by Brewer’s so that the clientele would buy more drinks. To vote, you had to write your candidate’s name on a cash-register receipt. Business zoomed. But the election almost went into a tailspin when a late starter appeared. The dark horse was a locally beloved dog named Tramp. When the final votes were counted Cowboy Evans nosed out Tramp by only 26 votes.

*Used by permission of M. Witmark & Sons, Copyright 1943.