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Ron Miller's DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 5, No. 51 |
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BOOK & FILM |
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Ron compares James M. Cain's 1942 crime novel LOVE'S LOVELY COUNTERFEIT with Allan Dwan's 1956 film version SLIGHTLY SCARLET |
 with her onscreen sister, ARLENE DAHL |
The book was a letdown,
so the movie sags, too
of TheColumnists.com
In between "The Postman Always Rings Twice" (1934) and "Double Indemnity" (1943), his two towering classics of crime fiction, author James M. Cain wrote a rather neglected little crime novel called "Love's Lovely Counterfeit" (1942), which was turned into an equally neglected movie called "Slightly Scarlet" (1956).
In retrospect, it's easy to understand why both book and film were neglected. The novel, like his two classics, has an unsavory character as its protagonist, but is missing the searing realism that still marks both "Postman" and "Indemnity" as icons of the 'hard-boiled" school of American fiction and the films made from them as immortal classics of the film noir genre.
Still, because Cain is such an important figure in the history of mystery/crime writing in America, many curious readers and film lovers still flock to "Love's Lovely Counterfeit" and "Slightly Scarlet."
The book's "hero" is big Ben Grace, a sort of "p.r. man" for urban racketeer Sol Caspar. He's one of those well-spoken, cleaned-up guys who often front for gangsters and keep busy smoothing things out for them.
Ben at first seems like a new kind of protagonist for Cain--a man who works for criminals, but is really above their crooked dealings and is longing for a decent life on the right side of the law. When he starts to fall in love with June Lyons, the smart aide to the reform mayoral candidate who sweeps the rascals out of office, we naturally assume he'll team up with her and, with his deep knowledge of the local underworld, help bury the city's criminal rats for good.
Well, that's where we're wrong. Ben turns out to be a bigger, smarter rat than the others. He really wants to turn Julie toward the dark side as he prepares to take over Sol's operation, finding new ways to make it pay even more money during the reign of the clean new mayor. And it seems to be working--until Julie's younger, nastier sister, Dorothy, turns up.
Dorothy is a bad apple who's been in trouble with the police before and continues to live dangerously once her older sister attempts to take charge of her life. When Ben starts to pay close attention to the lovely Dorothy, his master plan begins to come apart at the seams.
"Love's Lovely Counterfeit" purports to give us an inside view of a big city's criminal underbelly, but it doesn't have hard enough edges to convince us what Cain is showing us is real. Still, the unconventional plot, pitting two sisters against each other, is vintage Cain. Like most of his novels, it's tersely written and rockets along nicely.
By 1956, when Hollywood finally got around to filming the book, the age of gritty realism was already upon the film industry. We'd already seen John Huston's "The Asphalt Jungle," Jules Dassin's "Brute Force" and "The Naked City," Laslo Benedek's "The Wild One," Fritz Lang's "The Big Heat" and Elia Kazan's "On the Waterfront." There was no going back from the hard-edged crime movies of the late 1940s and early 1950s.
The studio that gave us "Slightly Scarlet" was RKO, which was in the throes of economic chaos after Howard Hughes had left and the new owner, General Teleradio, was struggling to keep the studio competitive. The year 1956 would be RKO's last as a viable studio. The following year, all employes were terminated and the studio's remaining films had to be distributed by rival studios.
That partially explains the poor judgment that resulted in RKO producing "Slightly Scarlet," which came from busy producer Benedict Bogeaus, who made many of the studio's B-grade "A" pictures in its final years. The director chosen was 70-year-old Allan Dwan, a Canadian-born Hollywood veteran who had made his first picture in 1911. Dwan didn't make "gritty" crime pictures and the studio required him to shoot this nasty story in color and in SuperScope, the studio's knockoff version of Fox's widescreen process, CinemaScope.
RKO and producer Bogeaus also assigned Dwan a second tier set of stars. John Payne played Ben with the proper smoothness, but lacking the visceral toughness the character needs. Payne had made the same sort of career transition that Dick Powell had made from juvenile male lead in musicals to playing anti-heroes in crime films. (Payne actually once sang "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" in the 1936 musical "Hats Off.") They probably thought of him for "Slightly Scarlet" because he'd just done a series of crime films with director Phil Karlson, starting with the acclaimed "Kansas City Confidential." In color, though, he just didn't look tough enough to buck classic heavy Ted DeCorsia, who played Caspar, the racket boss he double-crosses. (Ironically, the following year Payne started playing a hard-edged cowboy hero in the TV series, "The Restless Gun.")
The screenplay by Robert Blees also diminished the role of June, who was played by buxom redhead Rhonda Fleming, and built up the role of her wicked sister, played by yet another blazing redhead, Arlene Dahl. In fact, the film begins with June meeting Dorothy as she gets out of prison (for shoplifting?) while Ben (Payne) photographs them from a distance, obviously gathering "dirt" with which to smudge June and her boss, the reform mayoral candidate.
Cain's novel spends considerable time building up the budding romance between Ben and June, but it never really gets going in a convincing manner in the movie. There's no particular chemistry between Payne and Fleming, but the film cranks up the passion between him and Arlene Dahl quite a bit. Dahl, who would specialize in more ladylike characters later in her career, is allowed to turn on the heat in "Slightly Scarlet" and comes close to stealing the picture from her more-experienced co-stars.
"Slightly Scarlet" preserves the downbeat ending of "Love's Lovely Counterfeit," but it really has no impact because Dwan and his screenwriter never really make us care about these people--admittedly a difficult job for any director and screenwriter. The fact that "Slightly Scarlet" always looks like it's happening on a well-lighted Hollywood soundstage in color and SuperScope also doesn't help set much of a proper mood for the nastiness going on in Cain's story.
End result: Cain's so-so crime novel was turned into a so-so crime movie with a ho-hum cast in the final days of RKO, once perhaps the greatest source of tough films noir in Hollywood.
©2004 by Ron Miller.
The photo from "Slightly Scarlet" is courtesy of RKO
Radio Pictures. The film is now available in a new widescreen
DVD version from VCI Entertainment.
Ron
Miller is a former nationally syndicated television columnist
and the author of "Mystery! A Celebration," the official
companion book to PBS' "Mystery!" series. He's the
media mystery columnist for MYSTERY SCENE magazine and currently
teaches classes in mystery at Western Washington University in
Bellingham, Washington.
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