1980 Week: Little Miss Marker

          Envision The Sting (1973) without the zing, and you get an idea of what to expect from Little Miss Marker, a crime-themed comedy set in the Depression. Based on a vintage Damon Runyon story and written and directed by Hollywood vet Walter Bernstein, the movie wants desperately to recapture the effervescence of classic screwball comedies. It doesn’t. But thanks to star power and slick production values, the movie is watchable, provided your tolerance for schmaltz is high. Little Miss Marker is one of myriad movies featuring the perpetually crusty Walter Matthau as a cynical loner softened by the experience of becoming the surrogate parent to a sweet child. Adding to the movie’s sugar level is the presence of leading lady Julie Andrews. While her screen coupling with Matthau stretches credibility, her innate dignity elevates the whole production. Matthau plays “Sorrowful” Jones, a pitiless bookie forever at odds with local gangster Blackie (Tony Curtis), whom Jones has known since childhood. One day, a client who doesn’t have the cash to pay off a bet leaves his six-year-old daughter, “The Kid” (Sara Stimson), as collateral. When the girl’s father fails to return on schedule, Jones takes the Kid home as a means of protecting his investment.

          Limp comedy stems from the farcical situation of Jones trying to play homemaker. Later, once Jones learns that the Kid’s father has died, he resists turning her over to authorities, ostensibly because doing so would require Jones to explain his criminal enterprise. In reality, of course, he’s fallen for the kid and wants to protect her from the big, bad world. Complicating matters is Blackie’s scheme to open a new gambling joint, with money borrowed from Jones, and to fix a horse race involving a thoroughbred owned by society dame Amanda (Andrews). Figuring out where all this stuff is headed doesn’t require much imagination. When Runyon wrote the original story in 1932, the narrative might have seemed fresh and fun. Nearly 50 years later, the cocktail lost its fizz. Had Bernstein presented Little Miss Marker with a frenetic pace and different casting (namely, someone with more sass than Andrews), he might have put the thing over. Instead, he made something passable bordering on tedious. Stll, one can do worse than watching so many talented actors—the cast also includes Brian Dennehy, Lee Grant, Kenneth McMillan, and Bob Newhart—strut their stuff.

Little Miss Marker: FUNKY

The Front (1976)

          In the ’70s (and the ’80s, for that matter), Woody Allen only acted in two movies that he didn’t direct, and both are winners. Yet while Play It Again, Sam (1972) is essentially a Woody Allen movie because he wrote the script based upon his own play, The Front is that true rarity: a for-hire acting gig. It’s not hard to guess why Allen joined the project, because in addition to providing him with a great role, the film chronicles an important period in modern American history. A scathing look a the effects of the anti-communist blacklist that ravaged show business in the ’40s and ’50s by purging left-leaning artists from the mainstream, The Front is a message picture done right, delivering its themes with grace and restraint while also providing rousing entertainment.

          The picture’s authenticity and passion steams from the harrowing offscreen experiences of several key players: Screenwriter Walter Bernstein, director Martin Ritt, and actors including costar Zero Mostel were all blacklisted. In the story, which is set in New York during the ’50s, writer Alfred Miller (Michael Murphy) learns that he’s about to get blacklisted, so he reaches out to his opportunistic friend, lowly cashier Howard Prince (Allen), for an unusual favor. In exchange for a percentage of Alfred’s profits, Howard is asked to put his name on Alfred’s TV scripts, submit them as if he wrote them, and attend meetings pretending to be a writer. This way, Alfred can continue making a living even though studios won’t officially employ him.

          “Fronting” was incredibly widespread during the blacklist era, and it represented a huge risk for everyone involved, but that’s only one of the nuances The Front brings to life. In addition to portraying Howard’s moral conflicts—he becomes an admired and wealthy public figure under false pretenses, and an idealistic TV story editor (Andrea Marcovicci) falls in love with the man he’s pretending to be—the movie depicts the insidious effect of the blacklist on comedian Hecky Brown (Mostel).

          An amalgam of several real-life performers pushed off the screen because of their past support for liberal causes, Hecky is a tragic figure in the classic mold, a small man caught in the machinations of political forces he barely understands. Watching the cruel anti-communist crusaders slowly destroy Hecky rouses Howard’s previously dormant conscience, and for anyone who thinks of Allen merely as a joker, it’s startling to see the clarity and intensity of his performance. Allen does justice to Bernstein’s clockwork script, in the same way that Mostel, who was prone to abrasive excess, delivers a humane and poetic portrayal. (This was Mostel’s last onscreen role, and a fitting epitaph for his epic career.)

          The best thing about The Front is that it’s a great yarn in addition to being a powerful civics lesson. With Allen delivering zingers in his inimitable style, and with Bernstein carefully depicting the devious way right-wingers persecuted progressives, The Front smoothly balances humor and pathos, all the way from its mood-setting opening montage to its whopper of a closing scene.

The Front: RIGHT ON

The Molly Maguires (1970)

          An old-fashioned morality tale somewhat in the vein of John Ford’s classic film The Informer (1935), The Molly Maguires offers a fictionalized take on a group of real-life Irish immigrants who worked in Pennsylvania’s coalmines during the late 19th century. When a group of fed-up miners led by Jack Kehoe (Sean Connery) lashes out at their oppressive employers through a covert campaign of bombings and murders, the police send an Irish-born detective, James McParlan (Richard Harris), to infiltrate and expose Kehoe’s group, causing McParlan to experience a crisis of conscience: The more he learns about the secret guerilla organization called “The Molly Maguires,” the more he sympathizes with them.

          As scripted by once-blacklisted Hollywood lefty Walter Bernstein and as directed by sensitive humanist Martin Ritt, The Molly Maguires takes an unusually nuanced view of radical politics. The picture lays out the reasons why the workers rebel—dangerous work conditions, a usurious pay structure in which the mining company withholds nearly all wages through outrageous “deductions”—yet the filmmakers don’t paint the Maguires as heroes. Instead, the Maguires are depicted as desperate men who resort to violence when pushed beyond reasonable limits.

          This distinction puts viewers squarely inside McParlan’s conflicted psyche, and the melancholy nature of Harris’ screen persona suits the story well. The actor is believable as a working-class bruiser and as a man who realizes he’s selling his soul for career advancement. The betrayal inherent to the story is accentuated by Connery’s tightly controlled performance, since the Kehoe character is acutely self-aware; especially toward the end of the picture, Connery does a strong job of demonstrating that Kehoe values his life less than the goal of making his oppressors understand his rage.

          Fittingly for a story about the Irish, there’s a darkly lyrical quality to The Molly Maguires; in particular, the tin whistles of Henry Mancini’s score and the lilting accents of the various players make the gloomy mines and rolling hills of Pennsylvania seem like lost colonies of the Emerald Isle. Several strong supporting players add muscle to the picture as well. Frank Finlay is odiously pragmatic as McParland’s superior officer, while Anthony Costello, Art Lund, and Anthony Zerbe are fierce as Kehoe’s accomplices. Female lead Samantha Eggar, making the most of an underwritten role, is quietly principled as the local girl who falls for McParland without knowing his true identity.

          Although too conventionally made and slow-moving to qualify as any sort of classic, The Molly Maguires is intelligent, sincere, and thought-provoking.

The Molly Maguires: GROOVY