Manhattan Melodrama

Plot synopsis:
On June 15, 1904, the ship General Slocum catches fire and sinks in New York's East River. Two boys, Blackie Gallagher (Mickey Rooney) and Jim Wade (Jimmy Butler), are rescued by a priest, Father Joe (Leo Carrillo), but are orphaned by the disaster. They are taken in by another survivor, Poppa Rosen (George Sidney), who lost his young son in the sinking. The boys live with Poppa Rosen for a short while; then Rosen, a Russian Jew, is trampled to death by a policeman's horse after he heckles Leon Trotsky at a Communist rally and a melee breaks out.
The boys remain close friends, though their lives diverge. Studious from the very beginning, Jim (played as an adult by William Powell) gets his law degree and eventually becomes the assistant district attorney. Blackie is a cheerful, happy-go-lucky kid who loves to throw dice and trick other kids out of their money; he (Clark Gable) becomes the owner of a fancy, if illegal, casino. Though his casino is regularly "raided", the cops have been paid off and business resumes immediately after they leave. Blackie's girlfriend Eleanor (Myrna Loy) loves him, but pleads with him in vain to marry her and give up his dangerous life.
Jim is elected district attorney. Blackie, always a supporter and admirer of Jim's, knowing that he is incorruptible, arranges to meet him for a celebration, but something comes up, and he sends Eleanor to keep Jim company at the Cotton Club until he can join them. Jim and Eleanor talk the night away. Afterward, she gives Blackie one last chance to marry her and settle down. When Blackie refuses, she leaves him.
Months later, Jim and Eleanor meet by chance and start keeping company (she informs Jim that she has not seen Blackie for months). Meanwhile, Blackie kills Manny Arnold (Noel Madison) for not paying his gambling debts. Jim summons him to his office, where he tells him that he and Eleanor are going to get married. Blackie is sincerely happy for both of them. Jim also informs his friend that he is a suspect in the Arnold murder. However, there is no real evidence, so the crime goes unsolved.
Though Jim invites him to be the best man at his wedding, Blackie discreetly turns him down. After returning from his honeymoon, Jim runs for governor of New York. Snow (Thomas E. Jackson), who had been his chief assistant until Jim fired him for corruption, threatens to tell reporters that Jim covered up for Blackie in the Arnold case. Though untrue, this would lose Jim a close race for the governorship. By chance, Blackie and Eleanor meet at the horse track. Eleanor tells Blackie about Snow. Blackie shoots Snow dead in a washroom of Madison Square Garden during a hockey game. A beggar who pretends to be blind sees him leave the scene of the crime. Jim has no choice but to prosecute Blackie. Blackie is convicted and sentenced to death.
Jim wins the election, partly because the public knows that Jim is so honest he prosecuted his childhood friend. Eleanor tries to get him to commute the sentence to life imprisonment, revealing Blackie's selfless motive for killing Snow, but that only makes things worse. When Jim remains steadfast, Eleanor leaves him. At the last moment, Jim hurries to Sing Sing Prison and meets Blackie, together with Father Joe, who is now the prison's chaplain. Jim finally offers to commute the death sentence, but Blackie turns him down. Father Joe leads Blackie to the electric chair while saying last rites.
A few days later Jim calls a special joint session of the New York Legislature. He reveals how the murder helped him win the election and how at the end he compromised his principles and was willing to commute his friend's sentence. He then tenders his resignation. When he leaves, Eleanor is waiting for him. She tells him that she was wrong about him, and they leave together to start a new life.

Tags: murder

Review:
'Manhattan Melodrama' may not have the stylistic finish to it to make it a great message movie about contemporary 30s issues, but it does go a long way towards that end, and is never less than engaging.Clark Gable is the happy-go-lucky gangster Blackie who is being tried for murder by his boyhood best friend Jim, William Powell, a D.A. who has made it to governor of New York because of a murder done by Blackie, unbeknownst to Jim. On top of it all they both love the same woman, Myrna Loy.Despite its melodramatic but never overwrought style 'Manhattan Melodrama' has sufficient weight and substance to make itself heard 70 years after the fact.
It cuts no convenient corners in the description of the governor's sad plight of having to decide whether his friend should live or die, and it paints a wonderful and believable picture of Loy's character who does what she deems best.
Clark Gable and William Powell are boyhood friends who end up on opposite sides of the law in "Manhattan Melodrama," also starring Myrna Loy. Loy is lovely here, as usual, but she doesn't really have much of a role.
In the first scenes of the film, we see that they are orphaned and taken in by a man who has lost his son in the same fire that killed the boys' friends and family.When we see them in present day, Gable is running an illegal gambling joint, leaning on people for money they owe, and dating the Loy character.
Powell's scene at the end of the film is very touching.Enjoy the great stars and the story, but don't look for laughs..
But for me, watching Clark Gable portray a happy-go-lucky double murderer, who garners tons of sympathy from the audience; it was a first.Manhattan Melodrama is a film of dubious and rather interesting morals.
But here he's played by Clark Gable, about as charming an actor as ever lived, and the movie takes place in the 1930s, when gangster pictures like Little Caesar elevated these types of men into hero roles.The picture makes a very blatant message against the heroic vision of gangsters (In a speech by Jim that feels as if the men who controlled the Production Code were standing off screen holding the cue cards for him).
The second was the Great Depression, and how it impacted the traditional notion of the "American dream." Families – regardless of character or social standing – were torn apart amid the economic collapse, and no doubt many ordinary citizens contemplated crime as the route to happiness.Films like 'Manhattan Melodrama (1934)' and 'Angels with Dirty Faces (1938)' place great emphasis on the thin line between "good" and "bad" characters, and often the central criminals are lamented as victims of circumstance.
Circumstance, too, drives the fates of the characters in 'Manhattan Melodrama.' As children, both Jim Wade (William Powell) and Blackie Gallagher (Clark Gable) lose their parents in the burning of the steamship SS General Slocum, a true-life disaster caused by gross negligence that cost over 1000 lives.
Instead, the story's central conflict unfolds entirely within the righteous Wade, who must choose between his personal and professional allegiances.'Manhattan Melodrama' has achieved some notoriety for being the film that killed John Dillinger, so to speak.
These curious circumstances can't help but make one ponder what Dillinger had thought of 'Manhattan Melodrama.' Had he, like Blackie, accepted that his time was coming to an end?
And Myrna Loy, less than a month before she first appeared as wealthy gumshoe-ette Nora Charles, is the Woman Who Loves Them Both.Gable finds himself in a quandary: should he let old buddy Powell lose the big election over a dirty lie?
The story is a simple one about two men (William Powell, Clark Gable) who grew up together but are on opposite sides of the law.
Myrna Loy also stars as the woman initially with Blackie (Gable) who falls for and marries Jim (Powell).
Myrna Loy, who was often paired with William Powell or Clark Gable, is paired with both in "Manhattan Melodrama".
Powell plays Jim--a childhood friend of Blackie, who, due to shared tragedies, becomes his spiritual brother, but finds success as a D.A. and politician.The film covers a lot of ground and the early scenes move at breakneck speed to bring the story to the adult lives of the main characters.
What is so especially fascinating about this film is that Myrna Loy and Clark Gable do not 'click' at all, and glaze over when they look at one another, despite their best acting efforts to simulate at least some flickers of passion.
MANHATTAN MELODRAMA (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1934), directed by W.S. Van Dyke, has the distinction of being the last movie seen by gangster, John Dillinger, before being gunned down outside Chicago's Biograph Theater by federal agents.
For film historians, it's the first of thirteen movies to team William Powell and Myrna Loy. While not a history about Manhattan and the melodrama involving its police force fighting crime, the movie very much involves the lasting friendship between two men, as played by Clark Gable (excellent portrayal) and William Powell (in MGM debut).
Interestingly both actors were Academy Award nominated as best actors that year of 1934, but for different performances: Gable for IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT (Columbia) and Powell for his next assignment, THE THIN MAN, opposite Myrna Loy, yet this was their only melodrama on film together.The story opens with a prologue set on a riverboat, the U.S.S. General Slocum, Wednesday, June 15, 1904.
Move forward to 1920: Blackie (Clark Gable) is now a ruthless underworld leader and owner of a gambling house in Manhattan with Spud (Nat Pendleton) as one of the members of his mob, while Jim (William Powell), a graduate from Columbia University, working his way up from assistant district attorney to district attorney.
With Blackie's arrest and trial, Jim faces a difficult task as to whether to convict his very best friend or lose his respected title as governor.Other appearing in the cast include: Isabel Jewell (Annabelle, a dumb blonde comedy relief); Muriel Evans ("Tootsie" Malone); Frank Conroy, Edward Van Sloan and Samuel S.
Shirley Ross appears briefly in the Cotton Club sequence singing a Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart tune, "The Bad in Every Man," made famous years later under another title, "Blue Moon." A plot devise of boyhood pals growing up on opposite sides of the law may seem unoriginal considering many themes of this nature being played over the years, but depending on how its all played out and performed would give the distinction of success and failure.
While the versatile Cagney continued to play gangster tough guy-types for many years, MANHATTAN MELODRAMA became the last to have Gable leading a mob and carrying a gun.
Myrna Loy's character plays with conviction as well, changing from woman of the world mistress to lady with class, as well as a welcome change of pace watching Leo Carrillo playing his role straight without the usual broken dialect for which he is famous.While MANHATTAN MELODRAMA did not have as many television broadcasts in the sixties and seventies as any James Cagney or Humphrey Bogart crime melodramas for Warner Brothers, with the only way of viewing it back then was attending a revival movie house, the film does deserve to be part of the classic crime films of the 1930s, while in fact it is.
What a year Clark Gable, Myrna Loy and William Powell had in 1934, huh?
But Manhattan Melodrama shouldn't be discounted too quickly - at the least it's more than the simple footnote of Dillinger's pre-death-flick (I can relate - I would be there to see Myrna Loy, too).The film actually reminds me a bit of a later 30's flick, Angels with Dirty Faces - that film too was about two childhood friends, New Yorkers all the way, who go through paths in life that diverse, one to crime, the other to a more professional/helpful path.
Powell becomes a lawyer, then a prosecutor for the state and, eventually, governor, while Gable is always the gambler, the gangster, the guy who just wants to have a good time.
And Loy plays the girl who doesn't really come between them as stay friendly-if-neutral to Blackie while marrying Jim Wade - that, give the movie credit, would've been an easy direction for the melodrama as a love triangle, but it's more complicated, to be sure.The script gives its actors some good dramatic dialog to chew on, and among all the roles Gable probably gets to have the most fun while playing a not-too-good guy.
This has star power to burn; the actors all click together, and no wonder with Loy, but Gable and Powell work very well and believably together too, with the conflicts that come up between the brothers - of law and order vs the gangster way, albeit this isn't as harsh a look as 'Angels' - and how the dynamics subtly change over time.You might not think there's any arc here, but there are, at the least with Powell's Jim Wade who gets on the rise as a law-and-order man but has this friend who could be his downfall.
he's Gable - but watch for him in the last scene he has with Powell, he goes between a range of emotions that is just electrifying to watch (for me more believable than almost anything in Gone with the Wind).If Manhattan Melodrama is successful, and I think it is, it's because watching these actors - stars - in these roles, acting their asses off to make this more than believable, rather natural work, and van Dyke has some nice directorial choices.
That film history fact is about the only real distinction this well named "melodrama" has.Once again, it's a buddy story for Gable, this time the childhood pal of WILLIAM POWELL.
The cast surrounding the stars is an excellent one and Woody Van Dyke II directed with his usual skill, but there's no doubt of the film's dated attitudes and style as an old-fashioned melodrama.Trivia note: Hardest to accept is the fact that Mickey Rooney grows up to be Clark Gable!
If the story sounds familiar, you might be thinking of "San Francisco" which had Gable and Tracy taking different paths and in love with the same woman--this time it's MYRNA LOY.Loy plays her role as though it's an extension of her Nora role in "The Thin Man", so nothing seems fresh and original about the characters.
It's a well done examination of self, brought on by his great friendship with Gable and the final scenes are effectively played.Too slow for modern audiences, the film is notable only for the good chemistry between the stars but is overly melodramatic at every turn.
I didn't see it in 1934, I saw it last night; and the trouble is that almost anybody my age has seen 1938's San Francisco wherein Clark Gable once again played the semi-bad guy called Blackie, and the story was similar.
The movie also suffers from having Clark Gable, Merna Loy and William Powell in a romantic triangle.
Two kids, Mickey Rooney and Jimmy Butler who later become Clark Gable and William Powell, are left orphaned as a result of the famous General Slocum disaster in the first years of the 20th century.
If he wanted to see Gable, Powell, and Loy so badly, he should have waited later in the year for It Happened One Night or The Thin Man..
After all, it's hard NOT to enjoy a film starring Clark Gable, William Powell and Myrna Loy--they were dynamite actors and professionals.
It saw the first pairing of William Powell and Myrna Loy, whose chemistry on screen here worked so well that they would ultimately be teamed 14 times together in films.
Today, almost 80 years since its release, the film still retains its impact and wonderful entertainment value, thanks largely to a terrific script and the megawatt star power of its three leads.In the film, we meet two young chums, Jim Wade and "Blackie" Gallegher (the latter played by 13-year-old, 14th billed Mickey Rooney).
And then things become even more problematic, when Blackie kills a man and D.A. Wade must prosecute the case and find the killer....Harking back to Dillinger, I must say that if you are ever given the choice as to what your last movie will be before being executed, you could do a lot worse than "Manhattan Melodrama." All three stars are given ample opportunities to shine here: Gable is extremely likable, his faithfulness to his old buddy never wavering; Powell gives two tremendous speeches, one in the courtroom as he urges for the death penalty for his old friend, the other in front of the State Assembly; and Loy is just as sexy and beautiful as can be.
(Lorenz Hart would later rewrite the lyrics and turn it into the familiar standard "Blue Moon"!) Not to mention the crackerjack direction of W.S. Van Dyke, who would go on to helm four of the six "Thin Man" films starring Powell and Loy, and three films with Gable, including "San Francisco." Perfect entertainment package that the film is, it also offers the viewer a trip to Harlem's Cotton Club, a hockey game at Madison Square Garden AND a horse race at Belmont (during which the boys get out of Manhattan for a while, for an afternoon in Queens).
I mentioned "San Francisco" (1936); in that film his character was also named Blackie; and there was a conflict between the somewhat bad Blackie there and another man (in that case Spencer Tracy instead of William Powell) and a sort of battle of wills as to what kind of woman she (Jeanette MacDonald instead of Myrna Loy) would become.This is one of William Powell's better roles...and he usually was wonderful!
It takes this storyline very seriously and it works in large part thanks to the performances of both Powell and his counter part who is of course the suave and cool Clark Gable as the gangster Blackie Gallagher.
Powell is good as Wade and I like how the character is written as a man with an insanely strict moral compass who has a friend in Blackie.The biggest thing I wanted to see though was these friends being forced to reconcile their natures with their friendship.
One can't go wrong with Clark Gable, William Powell and Myrna Loy in the leads, and they all do commendable work.
I was on the lookout for this film after watching 2009's "Public Enemies", a story about 1930's gangster John Dillinger, who met his end coming out of a theater after watching "Manhattan Melodrama".
At least Blackie saw it coming, Dillinger got it in the back.I've recently been on a William Powell/Myrna Loy kick, but this one was more of a Powell/Gable flick.
The difference between the careers of a gangster and a politician are a matter of degree.Aside from the 'melodrama' aspects of the story, I was fascinated by an early scene when Blackie and Jim were still young boys.
"Manhattan Melodrama" is the only movie that Clark Gable and William Powell made together.
Nowhere is such honor better displayed than in the ending, which is a nice surprise, Although Gable and Powell had only this one film between them, female co-star Myrna Loy had many more films with both actors.
Clark Gable may be the gangster here, but Dillinger apparently went to see this because of his affection for its leading lady, Myrna Loy. She's Gable's old girlfriend who ends up choosing to become the wife of his old pal, William Powell, who is a candidate for governor.
The film earned a special place in history as, after John Dillinger attended a screening of it in Chicago on July 22, 1934, he was gunned down by the FBI.The film stars Clark Gable and William Powell as the gangster and illegal casino owner Edward J.
"Blackie" Gallagher and William Powell as the Manhattan District Attorney turned Governor of New York James W.
After seeing this one for the first time, I wonder how the entire public missed a great film.Clark Gable played a killer named Blackie in this one.
Myrna Loy is the woman between both of them.After watching Powell and Loy in the Thin Man movies, this film is a guilty sin of pleasure watching them getting involved in a triangle with Clark Gable.
Mankiewicz and stars William Powell, Clark Gable and Myrna Loy.William Powell gives one of his best performances in this as District Attorney Jim Wade.
In my opinion though this film is Powell's, he gives one of his best performances especially in the later scenes where he wrestles with his own conscience about Blackie's sentence.Over the years the film has become famous as well for being the film that John Dillinger had just finished watching when he was killed..
The difference between his noble refusal to live imprisoned rather than to get it all over with as soon as possible and Powell's presentation of the governor as weak makes Gable look that much more charismatic.But what I found strange here was Myrna Loy's character's efforts to get her husband the governor to pardon Blackie.
Fast forward 16 years, Jim (William Powell) has earned a law degree; Blackie (Clark Gable) runs an illegal gambling establishment.
In black and white for everyone to see.A gangster movie starring Clark Gable, William Powell and Myrna Loy, thankfully I was not disappointed.
I cannot believe anyone who is a gangster film fan, or a fan of Powell, Loy or Gable cannot love this film.
Clark Gable, William Powell, Myrna Loy. How could it be a bad movie?
It's an MGM A-Frame with Gable & Powell as boyhood friends and Myrna Loy as the woman they both grew up loving.Everyone acts their guts out in this aptly-titled tearjerker which was evidently filmed and released before lunch.