Life in the Raw: The Pre-Code Films of Mervyn LeRoy

One of LeRoy’s greatest triumphs arrived early in his directing career. His 1931 adaptation of W. R. Burnett’s novel Little Caesar—the thirteenth feature film LeRoy had made in just four years—was a smash hit and significantly elevated his stature at Warner Bros. While this was not the first-ever gangster film—and not even the first produced at Warner Bros.—Little Caesar nonetheless resonated with audiences and critics alike, heralding the advent of a now-famous cycle of crime pictures, including The Public Enemy (1931) and Scarface (1932).

The movie set the template: a feral hood ruthlessly climbs the underworld food chain, only to discover the perils of being at the top. Edward G. Robinson stars as Caesar Enrico “Rico” Bandello, a trigger-happy tough who graduates from gunning down gas stations for cash to running a major crime syndicate in Chicago. Rico bristles with hostility; at times, he seems to be practically crawling out of his skin with rage. At no point does LeRoy offer any significant backstory explaining how the protagonist became such a sadistic monster. We meet him in medias res, a fully formed misfit. Yet, like many characters in other LeRoy films, Rico soon becomes a paranoid loner, trapped in a dead end of his own making, perhaps running from a destructive past.

LeRoy reunited with Robinson for the equally popular (though now largely forgotten) Five Star Final (1931). In this film, everyone is either cheating or being cheated. Robinson stars as the editor of a flailing tabloid—the New York Evening Gazette—that tries to boost circulation by reviving a twenty-year-old murder case involving a woman named Nancy Vorhees, who shot her unfaithful husband. Living under a pseudonym, Vorhees is about to marry off the now-adult daughter she had with her first husband when the case returns to the headlines. LeRoy depicts not only the unscrupulous lows to which the press will stoop to get a story—including impersonating clergy—but also the shocking toll this ordeal takes on Vorhees and her family, leaving a trail of dead bodies in its wake.

The world that LeRoy creates in these films is one in which the buffoonish upper classes cling to power as everyone else scrambles to survive. Both High Pressure (1932) and Hard to Handle (1933) follow the spiraling schemes of bona fide grifters. In High Pressure, William Powell plays “the greatest promoter in the world,” whom we first meet crumpled on a couch after a drinking binge. We see him, après schvitz, hawking shares for a fictional business, the Golden Gate Artificial Rubber Co., in a pyramid scheme whose dizzying heights LeRoy depicts with anarchic charm. James Cagney takes on a similar role in Hard to Handle, though he’s faster in both his talking and his running—and, naturally, both films include several scenes in which these con men literally sprint away from the messes they’ve made. These men are not viewed as aberrations. In LeRoy’s pre-Code movies, a scam is as American as apple pie.

Two very different films—the comic Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933) and the tragic Three on a Match (1932)—find LeRoy turning his focus to the lives of women trying to get by in the big city. The quartet of showgirls at the center of Gold Diggers are accustomed to their shows closing before they even open, but their luck changes when they meet a palooka songwriter who is secretly wealthy. The film oscillates between LeRoy’s punch-drunk comedy and Busby Berkeley’s grandly surreal production numbers, which even manage to find cinematic wonder in soup lines and street-level urban desolation.

Three on a Match follows a trio of public-school peers who reunite as adults. In one breathless hour, we observe these women’s fates: the former “worst girl in school” (Joan Blondell) ends up in a reformatory for grand larceny; the valedictorian (Bette Davis) becomes a stenographer; and the popular girl (Ann Dvorak) is a bored and immensely wealthy housewife. There is a vertiginous downward turn for one of these characters, who resurfaces as a coke-addled guttersnipe holding a child for ransom. LeRoy does not shy away from depicting the depths of her desperation; a shocking climactic scene involving an upper-floor window that has been nailed shut may make viewers gasp aloud.

Perhaps the greatest film of LeRoy’s career originates from this period. By his own assessment the most important movie he ever made, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932) is based on the true story and autobiography of Robert Elliott Burns, and involved his direct collaboration. Burns’s presence in California to work on the script was kept secret to prevent his extradition to Georgia, where he was a wanted man for escaping the very chain gang he had written about.

Fresh off his leading role in Scarface, Paul Muni stars as a returning World War I sergeant who leaves the safety of his post in the shipping department of his hometown’s shoe factory to crisscross the country in search of construction work, hoping to become an engineer. Instead, he winds up a vagabond. One night, starving, he unwittingly gets involved in a petty robbery of a diner car and finds himself sentenced to ten years of hard labor on a chain gang. LeRoy’s depiction of Muni’s incarceration is chilling; lashings, punches, and verbal abuse are standard treatment at the prison. As with several of the films in this series, I Am a Fugitive hardly uses any nondiegetic music, so much of the horror unfolds in unnerving silence, punctuated only by the clang of chains and the shouts of men. The film concludes with a Kafkaeque spiral of bleakness and one of the grimmest endings in Hollywood history.

LeRoy was, in many ways, the quintessential company man—he not only married a Warner (Doris, who was the daughter of Harry M. Warner, then president of Warner Brothers–First National Pictures, where LeRoy directed all the films in this series), he named his son Warner. But a closer look at the director’s pre-Code work reveals another side of him: inside this reliable company man was a streetwise kid teetering on the edge of ruin, surviving on his own smarts.