BOOTLEG FILES 882: “Roadhouse Nights” (1930 feature starring Helen Morgan and Jimmy Durante).
LAST SEEN: On YouTube.
AMERICAN HOME VIDEO: None.
REASON FOR BOOTLEG STATUS: It fell through the proverbial cracks.
CHANCES OF SEEING A COMMERCIAL DVD RELEASE: Nope.
The 1930 feature “Roadhouse Nights” is a production that is more famous for its back story and assembled talent and less celebrated for its contents. To be frank, it is among the most interesting and most boring films ever reviewed in The Bootleg Files series.
“Roadhouse Nights” was inspired by Dashiell Hammett’s 1929 best-seller “Red Harvest,” but the great novelist rejected efforts by Paramount Pictures to acquire the screen rights to his work. Rather than create an unauthorized film version, Paramount contracted Ben Hecht to modify “Red Harvest” so the strongest plot elements of “Red Harvest” could be used as the foundation for a similar story. However, the screenplay offered in the final film is so wobbly that one must assume Hecht’s work underwent significant rewriting by less talented scribes.
Paramount assigned Walter Wanger to be the producer of “Roadhouse Nights,” which marked his first on-screen credit. He would later become one of the most influential independent producers in Hollywood history. Hobart Henley, a prolific (if somewhat undistinguished) actor and director of the silent films, was assigned to direct this film.
Unfortunately, “Roadhouse Nights” carries all the vices that burdened most of the early talking pictures. Henley’s direction is static and stagey, with long stretches of medium shots featuring actors who rarely engage in animated physical movement and tend to speak a tad too loud for normal conversations. Being a gangster movie, the film serves up the cinematic cliché of the gangster who walks around with a permanent sneer, speaks in slow and deliberate tones, and keeps his verbiage in rough monosyllables. Not unlike many American films of that era, it is an endurance test for most of today’s viewers to sit through.
The film involves bootlegger Sam Horner (Fred Kohler) who runs the roadhouse cited in the title – back in the 1930s, this was a euphemism for a nightclub that served liquor that was supposed to be outlawed by Prohibition. A Chicago reporter investigating Horner was killed by the hood, and his boozing colleague Willie Bindbugel (Charles Ruggles) follows up to patch together the interrupted reporting. With the help of Willie’s one-time girlfriend Lola Fagan (Helen Morgan), who is now a singing headliner at Kohler’s establishment, Horner gets his long-overdue comeuppance.
“Roadhouse Nights” gave Ruggles a starring turn, though in the course of his career he found a more lucrative niche as a comic character actor in scene-stealing supporting parts. Watching “Roadhouse Nights,” it is easy to see why he never secured leading man status – he was a pleasant presence who just lacked that certain je ne sais quoi that separates stars from supporting actors.
The film also offers a rare glimpse of singer Helen Morgan, whose film career was mostly defined by the 1929 “Applause” and the 1936 “Show Boat.” She wasn’t the best actress and her film work between “Roadhouse Nights” and “Show Boat” were mostly musical guest appearances that took advantage of her peerless singing.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of “Roadhouse Nights” was the appearance of the vaudeville team of Clayton, Jackson and Durante in their only film together. They were Lou Clayton, Eddie Jackson and Jimmy Durante, and the trio were major vaudeville stars who specialized in musical novelties and knockabout comedy. “Roadhouse Nights” does not capture the vibrancy of that act, but instead provides the trio with two musical numbers where Durante hogs the spotlight with his bombastic personality while Clayton and Jackson barely register. Durante also has a supporting role as Morgan’s confidant, and the singer clearly enjoys sharing her scenes with the eccentric funnyman. (In their scenes, there is an oversized stuffed dog toy that has a prominent place on Morgan’s table – this might have been used to hide a microphone needed for the early talkie recording technology to pick up their dialogue.) After the film was released, the trio broke up – Clayton left performing to become Durante’s manager and Jackson continued to perform in revues and an occasional musical film while Durante was signed to a contract at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer that brought him to stardom.
“Roadhouse Nights” opened to decent reviews but didn’t really click with audiences and was quickly forgotten. The film was never commercially released in any home entertainment format, although a decent print is on YouTube. As for its source material, Dashiell Hammett’s “Red Harvest” would later inspire such diverse films as Akira Kurosawa’s “Yojimbo,” Sergio Leone’s “A Fistful of Dollars” and Walter Hill’s “Last Man Standing,” but to date there have never been a direct adaptation of the work for the big screen. Go figure.
IMPORTANT NOTICE: While this weekly column acknowledges the presence of rare film and television productions through the so-called collector-to-collector market, this should not be seen as encouraging or condoning the unauthorized duplication and distribution of copyright-protected material, either through DVDs or Blu-ray discs or through postings on Internet video sites.
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