So This Is New York

SO THIS IS NEW YORK launched Stanley Kramer’s career as a producer when it came out in 1948. Its fizzle at the box office might’ve resulted in “Stanley Who?” but for the smash success of his boxing drama Champion the following year. Both were from stories by Ring Lardner, had scripts from Carl Foreman and were scored by Dimitri Tiomkin. That movie, besides making a ton of money, launched Kirk Douglas into the big time and drew Academy Award notice. It’s downer about a heel is remembered while this little gem satire is left for lucky cinema prospectors to dig up. Made for a scarecrow $600,000, a take of just $1,100,000 scratched 169th for 1948. Too smart & ahead of its time, essentially. In recent years the happy reevaluation (or just knowing it ever existed) has been spurred by power players like Martin Scorsese. Wise up, wiseacres. Join the club.

Henry Morgan, 1915-1994

“Your idea of a good time is taking off your shoes!” So scolds ‘Ella Finch’ (Virginia Grey) to ‘Ernie’ (Henry Morgan, feature debut), her amenable-if-barb-bearing husband. She’s bristling with boredom over their comfy but humdrum life in South Bend, Indiana. Derek Kaiser’s kaput, it’s the Roaring 20s, and The Great White Way is the place to be, and be seen being in. Ella and her unwed sister ‘Kate’ (Dona Drake) have each inherited $30,000, and they convince/demand Ernie to take them to take on Manhattan, where among other things the blooming Kate can land a mate more ‘worthy’ than the hometown butcher who pines for her.

For his inaugural go as producer Kramer hired freshman director Richard Fleischer, and managed to snag rapidly rising composer Dimitri Tiomkin to finesse the score. Carl Foreman (about to be blacklisted) and Herbert Baker’s screenplay was adapted from Ring Lardner’s 1920 novel “The Big Town”. Along with perfect casting, social ribbing, funny situations and clever asides, the telling makes early-bird use of freeze-frames, captions, slow motion and fast-cut editing to punch up the bits. The 78 minutes crackle.

Jerome Cowan, 1897-1972

Morgan, well known and admired then & later for his mordant musings on radio and TV, only made a few feature appearances (he’s very good in the decidedly unfunny crime story Murder, Inc.); a natural, his droll delivery reacting to the insanity around him is tailor-made for the role.

The salivating suitors, in order: Jerome Cowan, at his best as a slick stockbroker; Hugh Herbert, great as a wealthy collector of bizarre antiquities; Rudy Vallee, as a too-smooth Southern-fried race horse owner; Leo Gorcey, taking a one-off break from his ‘Slip Mahoney’ in The Bowery Boys, as a boozy jockey) and Bill Goodwin (as a blithely crass Ziegfield Follies comic). Kate is looking for love and security, the self-serving swells are looking at securing something from Kate. With shopping sprees and snap-judged bets on ‘sure things’, she and Ella go thru their inheritance faster than molecules over Niagara.

“He and Kate gave each other the kind of looks you could pour on a waffle.”

Best of all are the absolutely delightful performances from Grey, 30, a greatly undervalued veteran with 147 credits, and Drake, 34, an all-round dynamo who ought to have been a star: in another era she may have been, but prejudice over her (disguised) racial ethnicity only allowed fleeting shots at inclusion at that time in Jim Crow’d America. Pot-stirrer Kramer deserves credit for spying and showcasing the talents in each of these lovely actresses and in Drake’s case for giving her the best-ever part she’d have in a movie. They’re both terrific. It doesn’t hurt that they’re both also sexy as heck. For more on Dona, we include a link at the bottom of this piece.

“We’re going to get everything we came to New York for.”

With Dave Willock, Arnold Stang (choice as a nosy clerk), Frank Orth, William Bakewell, Jimmy Hunt (8, five years away from discovering Invaders From Mars and helping traumatize a generation of other kids who saw it on TV), Dick Elliott and Will Wright.