Reuben Mamoulian (1939)
In the title role that made him a star William Holden is sensitively dynamic. As the woman who falls in love with him, Barbara Stanwyck is passionate and credible. As Holden’s no less loving father, Lee J Cobb is the first of those two adjectives even if not the second. None of this is enough to prevent Golden Boy becoming, quite soon, a strenuously repetitive melodrama.
The source material is a 1937 stage play (and Broadway hit) of the same name by Clifford Odets. Since I don’t know the play and Odets declined to be involved in its translation to the screen I’m not sure how much the defects of Reuben Mamoulian’s film are in the original and how much down to the adaptation. But the social and political earnestness for which Odets is famous suggests it might be unfair to attach much blame to those credited with the screenplay (Lewis Meltzer, Daniel Taradash, Sarah Y Mason and Victor Heerman). After watching Golden Boy, I learned the stage play concludes with the death of the two main characters. Mamoulian’s movie supplies them with a happy ending. This may be an audience-pleasing Hollywood copout but at least makes a change from the torturous events that have gone before.
The film starts well, in the office of the New York boxing promoter Tom Moody (Adolphe Menjou). Not the force he once was in the fight game, Moody is now struggling to stave off bankruptcy, though his personal life seems to offer a happier future. As soon as his divorce comes through, he’ll marry his mistress Lorna Moon (Stanwyck), with whom he shares this opening scene. Adolphe Menjou is a good blend of hectic and weary; Stanwyck’s Lorna seems devoted to Moody yet disappointed she’s not going to get more out of life than him. Then an employee called Joe Bonaparte (Holden) enters the office to report that Lucky Nelson, the fighter on whom Moody had pinned hopes of reviving his professional fortunes, has been injured in training and won’t be able to fight in a bout taking place that very evening. Joe proposes that he take Nelson’s place. Moody ridicules the idea – the young man, as far as he knows, has never thrown a punch. When Moody visits the gym and discovers it was Joe that put Nelson (Roy Moore) hors de combat he has second thoughts. When Lorna remarks that beggars can’t be choosers, Moody agrees to let Joe fight.
Needless to say, Joe wins the bout and it’s the start of something big. As he, Moody and Lorna celebrate his successful debut, however, the film introduces us to the rest of the Bonaparte family. In his father’s eyes, Joe is bound for a stellar career in the concert hall rather than the boxing ring: he’s a classical violinist of exceptional promise. Mr Bonaparte is far from rich but has scrimped and saved to buy his son a $1,500 Ruggieri violin. Joe’s gifts, according to the scheme of the story, are polar opposites. Will he opt for prizefighting – a world of brutal aggression, corruption and mob involvement – or for fiddling of a very different, culturally noble kind? Will he use his artist’s hands, or his fists? (He tries to have it both ways when he goes in the ring but attempts to protect his fingers from damage.) The chalk-and-cheese combination of talents verges on the comical even at the start yet the plot returns again and again to the protagonist’s agonising dilemma. If Golden Boy were a piece of classical music, it would definitely be a rondo.
The only thing Joe’s twin gifts have in common is that both are potential routes out of his humble background, towards attainment of the American Dream and prosperity. In theory, that is: as Mr Bonaparte enthuses about his son’s career prospects, his friend and neighbour Siggie (Sam Levene) asks the proud father, ’Could a boy make a living playing this instrument in our competitive civilisation today?’ In this first scene chez Bonaparte, it takes a while to get a handle on the racial mix of characters. Although the family’s surname is French (and pronounced by all concerned in the French way), Lee J Cobb is an emphatically Italian immigrant: he speaks English ‘like a-theess’ – to use the term coined by Anthony Lane in his review of Rob Marshall’s Nine, seventy years after the release of Golden Boy. (Cobb, only seven years William Holden’s senior, was a mere twenty-eight at the time and wears a great deal of aging make-up. The lake lines and clumps of facial hair are disfiguring but it’s a remarkable and deeply felt, if bizarre, performance.) With Sam Levene’s Siggie sounding traditional Hollywood-Jewish, the air is thick with thick accents. The ethnic focus is more decisively Italian-American at the Bonapartes’ later New Year celebration, which Joe and his now girlfriend Lorna attend. This is one of Golden Boy’s more relaxed and pleasant moments, as the guests gather round the piano for ‘Funiculì, funiculà’. It gives us a break not only from the melodrama but also from Victor Young’s similarly relentless score.
The film is overwritten, sometimes with a tin ear (as Siggie’s line above illustrates), and betrays its theatre origins in the way characters keep making their entrances and exits. An exit of a more permanent kind triggers the climax to the story: a punch from Joe proves fatal for his African-American opponent, the very unfortunately named Chocolate Drop (James ‘Cannonball’ Greene). This episode is disagreeable in various ways, including the censorious-cum-derisive depiction of the crowd at Madison Square Garden – black and white faces baying for blood, a young woman entirely preoccupied with applying her make-up, a posh older one who tells her husband watching the fight makes her ‘quite ill’. ‘Would you rather leave, darling?’ he asks. ‘What? And miss the rest of it?’ she replies. This shorthand social satire sits oddly in the wordily anguished context of Golden Boy.
11 February 2019
