Ride the Pink Horse (1947): Robert Montgomery Stars in, and Directs a Classic Film Noir, with a Ben Hecht-Charles Lederer Script, about a Disillusioned World War II Veteran

 

 

Wednesday, March 11, 2020

Ride the Pink Horse (1947)

By Nicholas Stix
Corrected at 1:36 a.m., on Friday, March 27, 2020

“The common man has won the war and lost his livelihood.”

You came out with strings to dangle your medals.

The first quote was by Thorstein Veblen, in his brilliant “comp” book, The Engineers and the Price System (1921), composed of essays he’d written in 1919, shortly after war’s end. The second is a paraphrase of a line by a character in Robert Montgomery’s Ride the Pink Horse, a federal agent, Retz (Art Smith), to Montgomery’s embittered, cynical character, Lucky Gagin. Retz knows all about Gagin, and does his best to keep him alive. He is one of Gagin’s three guardian angels. Gagin returns the favor by calling Retz “Uncle,” for Uncle Sam, but it’s not meant with affection. Uncle Sam is no friend of his, and Retz understands perfectly.

The disillusioned, embittered war veteran was a staple of Hollywood, and was a real, American social type.

In Raoul Walsh’s gangster masterpiece, The Roaring Twenties (1939), when Jimmy Cagney’s character, Eddie Bartlett, returns from WWI combat in the infantry to reclaim the taxi driver job his boss had promised would be waiting for him, as the boss reneges on his promise, the new workers, combat shirkers all, mock Eddie with an Army “Jody call”:

“You had a good job
But you left!
You’re right!
You had a good job
But you left!
You’re right!”

Eddie responds by slugging one shirker, who falls into the others, tumbling them all, like so many bowling pins, and embarks on a life of crime.

Writers who had been adults when the Great War ended, recalled the type, when our boys came home from WWII. The feds did learn some lessons—the G.I. Bill and military-industrial complex ensured that there would be no more Hoovervilles—but as embodied in The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), still there were at least two classes of men who did not serve, and who took advantage of the absence of the now haunted men who had put their lives on the line for their country.

One such character was “Stinky” Merkle, who had been drug store assistant soda jerk to Fred Derry (Dana Andrews) before The War. While Fred, “killer of a hundred men,” dropped bombs on Germans as a bombardier, and made it to captain, Stinky stayed home and moved up. Now Fred is back to being a soda jerk, and must address Stinky, who wears a suit and tie, as “Mr. Merkle.” Like organization man Stinky Merkle, the drug store director who represents the chain that bought out the kindly old founder and gave him a sinecure doesn’t give a hoot about Fred’s sacrifices.

The second type is Mr. Milton (Ray Collins: Citizen Kane, Perry Mason, etc.), the president of the local bank, where Sgt. Al Stephenson (Fredric March) worked before the war, and now has his job back, with a promotion to vice-president, to put out a friendly face to veterans.

Al hates Milton with a purple passion, such that he cannot talk to him on the telephone without the protection of a drink in one hand, and a cigarette in the other. Whenever he mentions Mr. Milton to his wife, Millie (brilliantly underplayed by Myrna Loy), he always refers to him as “the old hypocrite.”

While Al at times hams it up (e.g., whenever he gets drunk), and at the high point of his professional life during a hilarious drunken speech he gives at a dinner thrown in his honor comes one sentence from committing professional suicide (Millie subtly rescues him), March's performance consists of layers upon layers of different degrees of hamminess and subtlety.

Mr. Milton, who has never gone in harm’s way, has the local monopoly on administering G.I. Bill loans. Although the feds guarantee the loans, which thus require no collateral, he still seeks after pretexts to cheat returning G.I.s out of their due (e.g., by demanding collateral he knows they don’t have, and don’t need). In Robert E. Sherwood’s (The Petrified Forest, Abe Lincoln in Illinois, Man on a Tightrope) screenplay, he wrote a brilliant speech for March—the one that almost gets Al fired—in which he mercilessly mocks Milton, describing a scenario in which he defies his commanding officer’s order to take a hill. “That requires collateral, sir. No collateral, no hill!...

“And that’s why we lost the war.”

While the class antagonisms in the movie are unmistakable, they are much louder in the movie’s source material, Mackinlay Kantor’s moving, 268-page prose poem, Glory for Me. While I can fully appreciate Mack Kantor’s take on class conflict, his story was unfilmable. Bob Sherwood, who at the time was, with Ben Hecht (The Front Page, Spellbound, Notorious, etc.) and Robert Riskin (It Happened One Night and Mr. Deeds Goes to Town), one of the world’s three greatest screenwriters, rescued the project.

Another character in BYOL represents a third type—Cliff (Steve Cochran), a guy who “served” himself, was probably involved in contraband and the black market in the service, and who now is mobbed up, and openly sleeping with Fred Derry’s slutty wife, Marie.

In Pink Horse, a motley crew of types like Cliff surround mobster Frank Hugo (Fred Clark, in his first movie role). But they’re not smooth, like Cliff. They play with knives.

Robert Montgomery plays the protagonist, Lucky Gagin. Lucky’s war buddy, “Shorty,” from their post out in the South Pacific, worked for Hugo, but tried to blackmail him. Hugo gave Shorty a fat check, but the blackmailer never lived to cash it.

Before Shorty got it, he’d given the check to his best friend, Lucky. (Actually, everyone refers to Lucky simply as “Gagin,” if they know that much.)

In Dorothy B. Hughes’ popular, eponymous novel, the protagonist is called “Sailor,” and the head cut-throat is a Senator whom Sailor refers to simply as “Sen.” Sen had his wife murdered, and Sailor is blackmailing him. According to Red Eddie Muller, because Bob Montgomery rubbed shoulders with senators and the like, he had to have the big cheese’s racket changed… to the rackets.

Gagin has gotten nowhere since leaving the service. “I’m nobody's friend. The man with no place.” He wants to blackmail Hugo for $30,000, but he’s just going to get himself killed.

Frank Hugo doesn’t hand over money like that to anyone. He’s a killer. He does the blackmailing.

The first time Gagan meets Hugo’s moll, Marjorie (Andrea King), he searches her bag for a gun. She responds, “You must lead a very interesting life.” The intrigued female promptly seeks to seduce him.

Gagin is acting rich, because he’s got his service separation pay, and he expects to be coming into a small fortune any day now. In a way, he’s smart, and in another way, he’s a fool. Smart: Later, when Marjorie offers a new blackmail scheme to soak Hugo for much more than $30,000, Gagin refuses, saying “Nobody stays up nights trying to help me.” But he’s dumb because Hugo is surrounded by killers at his beck and call, including Marjorie, while Gagin is flying solo.

Actually, Gagin has friends but he doesn’t know it. No fewer than three guardian angels keep saving his life. Each time these people meet him for the first time, they think to themselves, “This man needs help.”

San Pablo seems like Mexico. Extremely poor. Extremely Mexican. Everyone speaks Spanish. Actually, it’s in New Mexico (Santa Fe?), but you’d never know it.

Gagin can’t find a room, because it’s fiesta. The locals have a parade, followed by a ritual in which a straw effigy of the evil spirit will be set on fire, to drive him out.

Thus, although San Pablo is a small town, for two days it’s packed, and the hotels are all full. Thus, Gagin can’t find a room anywhere. In his wanderings, he runs into a fat, 40-something Mexican named Pancho (Thomas Gomez, playing the Akim Tamiroff role), who likes to drink to excess, who has a mañana attitude, and who owns a cheap merry-go-round with a pink horse.

Pancho squeezes Gagin for drinks, but in return becomes one of his friends/guardian angels. He has no roof over his head, but graciously consents to share his open-air bed with Gagin. Gagin is still deluding himself, and tells Pancho at one point, “I’m going to make you my partner, and give you $5,000. Pancho: “I know a lot of guys who are gonna get $5,000, but they have nothing.”

Pancho almost gets killed, saving Gagin’s life.
 

 

The Secret Star

When Gagin gets off the bus in San Pablo, he tries finding a certain hotel (where Hugo is staying), but he can’t even find it. The locals either have no idea where it is, or don’t know any English.

Along the way, a cute but scruffy little Mexican girl sees him, and immediately adopts him, like a stray dog who likes the way you smell. (I’ve been adopted by four dogs and one cat over the years, though none was a stray: Lana, Blackie Boy, Bobby, Jingles and Oreo.)

He tells her to scat, and she seems to go, only to constantly re-appear.

Her name is Pila, and she is visiting with some girlfriends from an even smaller, more backward village about 30 miles away. The girlfriends are looking for boys but Pila doesn’t know how to do that.

Only much later does Pila tell Gagin that she’d had a vision the moment she laid eyes on him. He was white as a ghost, lying on the ground, dead. She gives him a pocket-sized doll of a being who is to protect him against the Evil Spirit.

Village girls like Pila see things, and cannot distinguish between dreams, visions, and reality. In Trinidad, they say girls like that were “born in a veil.”

Pila never makes any protestations of love, but she is completely devoted to Gagin, and is ready to kill and/or die to keep him alive. That’s good for him, because Hugo and his assassins are constantly trying to kill “Lucky,” who is anything but.

Although Montgomery’s makeup and hair people make Wanda Hendrix look initially scruffy, they can’t hide her beautiful eyes. Although their green doesn’t show up in a black-and-white picture, they’re still stunning—cat eyes.

When Gagin gives Pila ten dollars (a fortune to her), and tells her to go to a beauty parlor and get cleaned up, she comes back looking stunning in every way.

Although Pila is initially in awe of Marjorie as beautiful and sophisticated, she is actually her superior in every way, including looks and figure. Gagin on Marjorie: “She has a dead fish where her heart ought to be.”

There’s a fascinating aspect to the way the screenwriters (Ben Hecht and Charles Lederer), makeup and hair people (Carmen Dirigo and Bud Westmore), cinematographer Russell Metty, and Montgomery and Hendrix depict Pila. When we first encounter her, she looks and acts like she’s about 12 years old. But every time she pops up again over the next 30 hours, she looks to be a few years older and wiser. (Hendrix was actually only 18.) The helpless-looking girl is actually very resourceful, and constantly saves Gagin’s life.

I’m sure Hecht and Lederer got the idea from Robert Nathan’s 1940 fantasy romance novel, Portrait of Jennie. When frustrated, failed young artist Eben Adams (Joseph Cotten) takes a walk through Central Park on a beautiful, spring day, a radiant little ten-year-old named Jennie Appleton (Jennifer Jones) appears out of, and disappears back to nowhere. But for a little while, as they walk and talk, this beautiful, charming little girl adopts the grown man and changes his life, inspiring him to paint her portrait suffused with the love that had earlier eluded him.

Every time Adams sees Jenny, she’s older and taller, and more beautiful. She models for him, and they fall madly in love.

Adams has another guardian angel, the old spinster art gallery owner, Miss Spinney (Ethel Barrymore), who was the first to buy a painting from him, out of pity and the hope it would jump-start his career. Miss Spinney is also not so secretly in love with Adams.

The problem is, nobody but Adams can see Jenny. Miss Spinney starts to doubt his sanity.

Thus did one of the great fantasies of the time greatly influence one of the great hard-edged films noir.

There was talk of Hendrix getting an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress, but nothing came of it. However, Thomas Gomez was nominated for Best Supporting Actor.

The creative team had at least three options, as to how to end the story—a happy ending, with Gagin sweeping Pila off her feet, a bittersweet ending, or one in which Gagin gets killed. I won’t give it away, except to say that the ending is moving.


Robert Montgomery led a very interesting life. He knew wealth and poverty. Unlike some of the characters he played, however, he actually did make a fortune.

Montgomery was a huge star from 1930-1941, but after playing a boxer who gets accidentally killed, due to a screw-up in heaven’s bureaucracy, in Calling Mr. Jordan (1941), which got him his second Best Actor Oscar nomination, he enlisted in the Navy, where he heroically served as a PT boat skipper, and separated from the service a lieutenant commander.

By the time Montgomery returned to Hollywood to star in John Ford’s They were Expendable (1945), he was 41, paunchy, and haggard. Other men, younger men, had dodged the draft, and built great careers while he was gone. He lost some of the weight, and got into directing. Montgomery never showed any bitterness, and in 1950 switched to the new medium of television, where from 1950-1957 he produced and hosted 320 episodes of the theatrical show, Robert Montgomery Presents. In 1950, Montgomery reprised his role as Lucky Gagin on his TV show.

Red Eddie Muller asserted that Montgomery should not have directed Pink Horse, because he gave “less than his best” both as director and star. Nonsense. Montgomery was excellent in both roles. This was not Muller's honest opinion. Rather, Muller was getting even at Montgomery for being a patriot.