Swan Song September: The Hoodlum Saint (1946)

This month we watch films featuring the final performance of a beloved star. This week we examine the last movie featuring Rags Ragland and Slim Summerville, The Hoodlum Saint.

RODNEY BOWCOCK: Returning home from WWI we meet Major Terry O’Neill (William Powell), who was a newspaper reporter before he left for overseas. He returns home to find himself out of a job and unable to get a new one, along with many other returning soldiers. Terry has reunited with a group of small time crooks and spends all of his money bailing them out of jail, showing what a generous guy he is toward the gang of misfits that he spends time with. Terry stumbles onto a scheme to crash a wedding in hopes of getting a job with a rival paper. It works and he meets lovely Kay Morrison (Esther Williams) there. Terry’s successful in his new role, but he isn’t satisfied to be making $100 a week, embarking on a string of risks to increase his stature and salary. Along the way he strikes up a romance with a torch singer named Dusty (Angela Lansbury) and gets involved with a phony charity. Of course, his character changes and he forgoes his old friends, before he ultimately is humbled by the stock market crash.

SAMANTHA GLASSER: This was William Powell's first film under his new contract at MGM. His frequent co-star Myrna Loy opted not to sign a new contract, ending their legendary run as a screen team.

Esther Williams is the main love interest, and she looks gloriously beautiful in the costume department's halfhearted attempts at historical accuracy. Angela Lansbury plays a sexy lounge singer rival.

RB: There’s nothing quite like Powell and Loy together, something that most of us will agree upon. And that’s even more obvious when you see Powell and Williams together. I mean, they’re FINE, but there’s no real chemistry that pops in spite of how wonderful they both are. It’s always entertaining though to see Angela Lansbury, not necessarily playing against type, but playing against the type that someone of my age associates her with. She was a great singer, but inexplicably, her songs here are dubbed by Doreen Tryden.

SG: The beginning of the film reminded me of The Roaring Twenties, a classic that depicts a group of disillusioned WWI soldiers returning home to find their old lives closed to them, so they become gangsters. Unfortunately, the story does not maintain a high level of quality. Director Norman Taurog, who also made Boys Town, imagined that The Hoodlum Saint would strike a nerve with the Oscar community. Williams said, "They were so caught up with Oscar fever that they lost sight of the need to make a movie that people would pay money to see."

RB: I think this scenario also struck a nerve with 1946 audiences, many of whom had loved ones (or themselves) had returned home from fighting another war overseas to find themselves in similar situations. Taurog became known for slapstick comedies eventually, helming some of the Martin-Lewis films and finished his career with a series of increasingly hokey and low budget musicals starring Elvis Presley. I like them, but that doesn’t mean that most of them are any good.

SG: What the film lacks is a struggle. Terry's ascent to the top comes easily. His romance with Kay is the only element of strife in his life, but the relationship isn't properly developed to make us feel invested in it. October 1929 comes too late to make a difference. According to Williams' memoir, there were more love scenes, but at the audience previews, people reacted sourly to a romance between two people 30 years apart, so the editors made extensive cuts. When the movie flopped, the studio blamed it on the fact that Williams didn't swim in it, and that it was shot in black and white, pushing her back into the old formula she was hoping to take a break from.

RB: We had discussed this before, but I still maintain that maybe there was a struggle, but we have no way of knowing because this is the rare example of a film that actually would’ve benefited from twenty minutes more footage. Yeah, I know that Terry made a lot of money but HOW did he do it. I wasn’t satisfied at all with the leaps in time.

SG: The age gap was acutely obvious to Williams. In the scene when Terry and Kay meet, she slaps him, and Taurog directed her to hit him hard. She was an athlete with strong, broad shoulders, and she was afraid of hurting her co-star who she perceived to be a frail old man. But wanting to please her director, she hit him. When she did, his face caved in. What Williams didn't realize was that the makeup department had used a series of rubber bands under makeup to give Powell's sagging face a youthful appearance on screen, and when she hit him, she broke them. During the shooting, Powell and Williams had birthdays; he got a cupcake, and she got a giant cake inscribed "To a Saint-- From the Hoodlums." Lansbury got married during the production to last week's blog star Richard Cromwell.

RB: It’s always great to read those sorts of stories about camaraderie on the set. Hopefully, our ol’ pal Byron Foulger who clocked in one of his many hundreds of uncredited roles in this film was on set that day. I think he should get a piece of cake.

SG: "This was below par for what you expect when Powell heads the cast," said A. E. Hancock of the Columbia Theatre in Columbia City, Indiana. "The fault, I think, was the thin scenario, and there are too many that way this season. It was disappointing, but it was a lot better than some of the trash that has come out this season."

RB: Oh, he went on. A.E. Hancock burned the joint to the ground. “I still think, and may be alone, if they can't find suitable material for pictures, they have some they should repeat. Rio Rita and Show Boat and a number of others would be good. We have a new generation of show -goers since they made these and I know they would be acceptable to the majority of the older showgoers. We have a bunch of stumble bums in Hollywood that don't seem to be on the job of making good program pictures. They should join the gang in Washington.” Hard to argue with some of these points.

SG: Photoplay's reviewer said, "This doesn’t make a great deal of sense and it’s packed with hokum, but the sure-fire performances by William Powell and Esther Williams will do much to hold your interest."

The boys playing Powell's ruffian friends bring a lot of color to a mostly genteel, high-society kind of drama. Among them are two actors in their swan songs.

Rags Ragland had a brief but memorable career as a doofy comedian in films like Girl Crazy, The Canterville Ghost and Anchors Aweigh. He spent more than two decades in burlesque honing his craft before breaking into Broadway with Panama Hattie thanks to his drinking buddies Buddy De Silva and Herbert Fields who wrote a part for him. That show was popular enough to inspire a movie version which brought Rags to Hollywood. He died at age 40 at Cedars of Lebanon of Brights Disease. The illness came on so suddenly, his family was unable to get to the hospital before he passed. Actors Phil Silvers and Frank Scannell, agent Colton Cronin and writer Wilkie Mahoney were at his bedside. Friend Frank Sinatra sang at a memorial service at the Cathedral of the Assumption in California, but his burial took place at the Evergreen Cemetery in his hometown of Louisville, Kentucky.

RB: This was an unfortunate loss, because it’s easy to imagine what a long and versatile career he could’ve had. I’m mainly familiar with his cameo in Abbott and Costello in Hollywood (released directly before this film), in which he goes head-to-head with Lou very capably in a madcap slapstick scene involving a barber chair.

SG: This is also the last film of comedian Slim Summerville. He began his career in Mack Sennett comedies taking pies to the face at the recommendation of his friend Edgar Kennedy. Later he played a soldier in All Quiet on the Western Front. He became associated with Zasu Pitts and made many comedies with her including They Just Had to Get Married and Niagara Falls. Summerville said he worked in the movies "just enough to cover expenses and let me get in some fishing." He suffered a series of strokes and died January 5th, 1946 at age 54 with his wife Eleanor by his side. A Christian Science service was held at Laguna Beach before his ashes were interred at Inglewood Cemetery.

RB: Silm Summerville is really, really good in this and it’s hard to imagine that he’s only 52 in this film. His deadpan delivery has a real innocence to it that I enjoyed a lot. He usually brings life to a picture. He had racked up over 200 credits by the time of his unfortunate passing.

SG: James Gleason, Frank McHugh, and Frank Jenks are also welcome faces in the cast.

RB: This movie has faults. No doubt about it. But the cast is not among them. I already mentioned Byron Foulger, who has few lines but a memorable and funny scene early in the film. James Gleason is really good too. Honestly, if you like character actors, there’s a lot that you’re going to like about this movie.

SG: This movie has style and potential to be very good, but it never quite lives up to it. 2.5 stars.

RB: The cast is really good too, but everything is handled in such a way that nothing really comes together and there’s a haphazard tone throughout the film. I like everyone involved I this movie, but it ultimately left me cold. 2.5 stars.