Said with sincere affection, Why Girls Leave Home (1945) is a crummy little pic. It's all shadows to dress up the cardboard and zingers to pep up the plot. B-noir by way of teensploitation, it crumples its moral panic into a mystery frame and wraps the whole ride up with a twist so delightful, it appalls me that no ritzier noir ever stole it. Not once otherwise along the way does it exceed its brief of a few thousand feet of film cranked out to fill the shorter half of a double bill. It would have been well worth its slice of the dime.
According to the clarinet swing of the credits, the screenplay was co-written by Fanya Ross Lawrence and Bradford Ropes; according to Philip Yordan, he wrote it in less than two days and if so he must have done it coming off a binge of Preminger and Welles. While the doctors wait for a dark-haired drowning victim to regain consciousness and the police look no further than her half-torn suicide note, the reporter who personally fished her out of the river opens his own investigation into her history, convinced she was no random jumper but the frightened whistleblower he had agreed to meet that night at the end of the pier: "I didn't get to her first. Someone else did." He interviews the wilted parents bewildered by their wild child, the squirrelly hipster who inducted her into the jive-jumping life, the cautious operator of the nightclub where she hustled from chorus to star, the tart roommate who fills in the fullest and bitterest picture of a girl who went looking for a career and found a racket, each installment in flashback inexorably advancing the plot to the present day where the bodies are beginning to pile up. The treatment isn't quite the full trouble in River City, but it wouldn't require too much cogitation on the part of the viewer to conclude that 78s of Artie Shaw and Glenn Miller pave the road to hostessing in back rooms where the roulette wheels are gaffed and troublesome marks may find themselves catching fatal doses of lead quicker than a soft-boiled dame can swear, "I'm going to blow the lid off the Kitten Club." If the reporter's right that one or more denizens of this hepped-up demimonde tried to snuff his canary before she could really sing, his inquiries are racing the clock of a second attempt. In the meantime, several musical numbers occur.
More than the pre-printed plot, the cast makes this shoestring confection of gats and gams. One of the ubiquitous faces of film noir before he was an Emmy-winning producer-director of tentpoles of mid-century TV, Sheldon Leonard slouched with equal conviction as mugs and thugs—I always forget I saw him first as Harry the Horse in the 1955 Guys and Dolls—and brings such comfortable cynicism to his crusading as Chris Williams of the Morning Record that he never risks transparent prose, much more resembling one of Chandler's tarnished knights when he encourages one of his seedier sources, "I'll even forget the dough I paid you for that red-hot tip that got me and my paper into a phony libel suit," or bellies up to a suspicious bar in aw-shucks impersonation of a well-heeled cattleman with a drawl that could flatten Ralph Bellamy. The detective lieutenant on the case scoffs after him, "And if you want to be a policeman, get yourself a badge!" but his amateur persistence serves the heroine far better than the official incuriosity of the law. So does the casting of Pamela Blake, whose restlessness lends more than ill-fated innocence to Diana Leslie's drive to escape the sinking middle class of her parents in favor of a little fun, a little money, something to do with her life that isn't waiting for marriage in a dead-end office job. She delivers the age-old plaint of frustrated youth as if she's working up to Mama Rose: "You don't want this, you don't want that—I can't even call my mind my own! Well, this time I'm going to do what I want to and you're not going to stop me!" The slap in the face with which her brother orders her to ditch her professional dreams explains the film's title, after which it feels grossly unfair that he wasn't the one found floating in the river. She shimmies with sheer excitement through her first all-night jam session, gradually cools and hardens into a sharp-shouldered chanteuse as chic and brittle as the cigarette holder she props with fashionable devil-may-carelessness, scornfully brazening out a direct threat, "I know all the angles and I know how to protect myself in the clinches," though if she were really as tough as her talk, she wouldn't care so much who gets capped or groomed or ground to gin-soaked obsolescence in the tinsel mill of the Kitten Club. Filling out the female focus of the story, Constance Worth's Flo offers the wised-up guidance of a pre-Code chorine, Claudia Drake's Marian Mason bears the grudge of a glamorous lush edged out of the spotlight, Lola Lane's Irene Mitchell looks coldly regal on the arm of Steve Raymond who wouldn't win any prizes for probity in show biz even if he weren't played by the chronically shifty Paul Guilfoyle. The standout of the supporting cast may still be Elisha Cook Jr., turning in a performance of unusual sleaze—he gets smacked around just to make sure the audience recognizes him, but Jimmie Lobo isn't just a wolf with a swelled head, never mind the farce of his boast that "Benny Goodman's pretty good, but I think I'm a little deeper in the groove." His presence in the Leslie household is a bad joke, all that fuss over the sophisticated new beau and then he's a shopworn punk with a clarinet. "Solid, honey, solid!" he whoops at the finish of their first duet, manic as a flak-man towing Diana past the ropes of a slumped rehearsal, "I'm telling you, Steve, you're passing up the jackpot—and a voice that'll make any microphone melt." By the time he's running the same serial line on the seminary-fresh sister he's confidentially wheedled as far as the club's always-open door, promising ingenuously that she'll "get a doctor's degree in philosophy much quicker here than in college," any viewer with half-decent defenses will have seen funnier heart attacks. It is totally superfluous under these conditions for the film to introduce a dear white-haired priest for a blarneyish come-to-Jesus moment. The catfight, on the other hand, complete with hair-pulling and handbag-whacking, fits right in.
( Try and prove it. )
Why Girls Leave Home was directed by William Berke for Producers Releasing Corporation, the type specimen of Poverty Row, and even the low-lit photography of Mack Stengler cannot confuse it for a movie with budget; I discovered it on rarefilmm in a format so ground down and jittery it could advertise for generation loss. Its opening scenes of fog-bound waterfront at night are all the more mysterious for being so hard to make out, a drive after dark could be radio even when it crashes, frame-skips punctuate the action and at one point the picture flips briefly upside down for the full experience of watching late-night TV on the fritz. I hope the Film Noir Foundation has it on their docket of restorations, both for its own sake and for the trivia that this unprepossessing object garnered two Oscar nominations. It lost in both cases to the heavyweights of Miklós Rózsa and Rodgers and Hammerstein, but Walter Greene did get the nod for Best Music Score of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture and so did Jay Livingston and Ray Evans for Best Original Song in their first of seven nominations with three eventual wins. It hasn't entered the American songbook in the same way as "It Might as Well Be Spring," but "The Cat and the Canary" is a chipperly catchy little number packed full of tongue-twister internal rhymes of which my favorite is a musician with ambition to audition for her hand, although never knew a fellow half as mellow who could sell a melody gets the extra holorime in there. The composer's demo charms me as much as Kander and Ebb doing "New York, New York." The ironic slant the song casts on its performers is just as noir as sharp lines like "Gin and high C don't mix." You get enough singers, songwriters, musicians in film noir, I hope someone's run a series of them sometime. This groove brought to you by my solid backers at Patreon.
According to the clarinet swing of the credits, the screenplay was co-written by Fanya Ross Lawrence and Bradford Ropes; according to Philip Yordan, he wrote it in less than two days and if so he must have done it coming off a binge of Preminger and Welles. While the doctors wait for a dark-haired drowning victim to regain consciousness and the police look no further than her half-torn suicide note, the reporter who personally fished her out of the river opens his own investigation into her history, convinced she was no random jumper but the frightened whistleblower he had agreed to meet that night at the end of the pier: "I didn't get to her first. Someone else did." He interviews the wilted parents bewildered by their wild child, the squirrelly hipster who inducted her into the jive-jumping life, the cautious operator of the nightclub where she hustled from chorus to star, the tart roommate who fills in the fullest and bitterest picture of a girl who went looking for a career and found a racket, each installment in flashback inexorably advancing the plot to the present day where the bodies are beginning to pile up. The treatment isn't quite the full trouble in River City, but it wouldn't require too much cogitation on the part of the viewer to conclude that 78s of Artie Shaw and Glenn Miller pave the road to hostessing in back rooms where the roulette wheels are gaffed and troublesome marks may find themselves catching fatal doses of lead quicker than a soft-boiled dame can swear, "I'm going to blow the lid off the Kitten Club." If the reporter's right that one or more denizens of this hepped-up demimonde tried to snuff his canary before she could really sing, his inquiries are racing the clock of a second attempt. In the meantime, several musical numbers occur.
More than the pre-printed plot, the cast makes this shoestring confection of gats and gams. One of the ubiquitous faces of film noir before he was an Emmy-winning producer-director of tentpoles of mid-century TV, Sheldon Leonard slouched with equal conviction as mugs and thugs—I always forget I saw him first as Harry the Horse in the 1955 Guys and Dolls—and brings such comfortable cynicism to his crusading as Chris Williams of the Morning Record that he never risks transparent prose, much more resembling one of Chandler's tarnished knights when he encourages one of his seedier sources, "I'll even forget the dough I paid you for that red-hot tip that got me and my paper into a phony libel suit," or bellies up to a suspicious bar in aw-shucks impersonation of a well-heeled cattleman with a drawl that could flatten Ralph Bellamy. The detective lieutenant on the case scoffs after him, "And if you want to be a policeman, get yourself a badge!" but his amateur persistence serves the heroine far better than the official incuriosity of the law. So does the casting of Pamela Blake, whose restlessness lends more than ill-fated innocence to Diana Leslie's drive to escape the sinking middle class of her parents in favor of a little fun, a little money, something to do with her life that isn't waiting for marriage in a dead-end office job. She delivers the age-old plaint of frustrated youth as if she's working up to Mama Rose: "You don't want this, you don't want that—I can't even call my mind my own! Well, this time I'm going to do what I want to and you're not going to stop me!" The slap in the face with which her brother orders her to ditch her professional dreams explains the film's title, after which it feels grossly unfair that he wasn't the one found floating in the river. She shimmies with sheer excitement through her first all-night jam session, gradually cools and hardens into a sharp-shouldered chanteuse as chic and brittle as the cigarette holder she props with fashionable devil-may-carelessness, scornfully brazening out a direct threat, "I know all the angles and I know how to protect myself in the clinches," though if she were really as tough as her talk, she wouldn't care so much who gets capped or groomed or ground to gin-soaked obsolescence in the tinsel mill of the Kitten Club. Filling out the female focus of the story, Constance Worth's Flo offers the wised-up guidance of a pre-Code chorine, Claudia Drake's Marian Mason bears the grudge of a glamorous lush edged out of the spotlight, Lola Lane's Irene Mitchell looks coldly regal on the arm of Steve Raymond who wouldn't win any prizes for probity in show biz even if he weren't played by the chronically shifty Paul Guilfoyle. The standout of the supporting cast may still be Elisha Cook Jr., turning in a performance of unusual sleaze—he gets smacked around just to make sure the audience recognizes him, but Jimmie Lobo isn't just a wolf with a swelled head, never mind the farce of his boast that "Benny Goodman's pretty good, but I think I'm a little deeper in the groove." His presence in the Leslie household is a bad joke, all that fuss over the sophisticated new beau and then he's a shopworn punk with a clarinet. "Solid, honey, solid!" he whoops at the finish of their first duet, manic as a flak-man towing Diana past the ropes of a slumped rehearsal, "I'm telling you, Steve, you're passing up the jackpot—and a voice that'll make any microphone melt." By the time he's running the same serial line on the seminary-fresh sister he's confidentially wheedled as far as the club's always-open door, promising ingenuously that she'll "get a doctor's degree in philosophy much quicker here than in college," any viewer with half-decent defenses will have seen funnier heart attacks. It is totally superfluous under these conditions for the film to introduce a dear white-haired priest for a blarneyish come-to-Jesus moment. The catfight, on the other hand, complete with hair-pulling and handbag-whacking, fits right in.
( Try and prove it. )
Why Girls Leave Home was directed by William Berke for Producers Releasing Corporation, the type specimen of Poverty Row, and even the low-lit photography of Mack Stengler cannot confuse it for a movie with budget; I discovered it on rarefilmm in a format so ground down and jittery it could advertise for generation loss. Its opening scenes of fog-bound waterfront at night are all the more mysterious for being so hard to make out, a drive after dark could be radio even when it crashes, frame-skips punctuate the action and at one point the picture flips briefly upside down for the full experience of watching late-night TV on the fritz. I hope the Film Noir Foundation has it on their docket of restorations, both for its own sake and for the trivia that this unprepossessing object garnered two Oscar nominations. It lost in both cases to the heavyweights of Miklós Rózsa and Rodgers and Hammerstein, but Walter Greene did get the nod for Best Music Score of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture and so did Jay Livingston and Ray Evans for Best Original Song in their first of seven nominations with three eventual wins. It hasn't entered the American songbook in the same way as "It Might as Well Be Spring," but "The Cat and the Canary" is a chipperly catchy little number packed full of tongue-twister internal rhymes of which my favorite is a musician with ambition to audition for her hand, although never knew a fellow half as mellow who could sell a melody gets the extra holorime in there. The composer's demo charms me as much as Kander and Ebb doing "New York, New York." The ironic slant the song casts on its performers is just as noir as sharp lines like "Gin and high C don't mix." You get enough singers, songwriters, musicians in film noir, I hope someone's run a series of them sometime. This groove brought to you by my solid backers at Patreon.
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