Hollywood actors who have long careers are likely to have distinctive personalities and characters that have them play the same person in a number of different settings, just as the audience would like to believe that they too could move from living in a gangster movie to a western or from a comedy to a melodrama. Jack Lemon, for example, was a likeable but timid pushover who managed to be a Parisian policeman in a bordello, an ex-alcoholic, and the apartment ever used by his office boss, Fred MacMurray, to meet assignations. Somehow, Lemon was always appealing. The same is true of Edward G. Robinson, who had a nearly forty year career, and who was readily identified in his early days for the tough gangster and his striking intonation of “See?” that were often mimicked and put in cartoon movies. His personality and character, however, were not all that tough, even at the beginning. To the contrary, what sustained all his roles from “Little Caesar” in 1932 to “Soylent Green” in 1967, was his contemplativeness, as expressed largely in his voice and in a muggish face that nevertheless allowed him to express his secret thoughts, to see him able to change his mind, to observe the world of which he was a part, something all of us cultivate, which is to both be there and to observe what is being noticed at the moment when it is happening. Quite an accomplishment, even greater than Cary Grant’s upper class diction and amused befuddlement that also gave him a very extended run.
That was true in even his breakthrough role in “Little Caesar”. Robinson did not play the psychopath that Paul Muni did in “Scarface'' that appeared a year or so after “Little Caesar” in , and seems more like what major drug dealers are really like. Rather, Robinson was more like the father and son Godfathers. They are cold if cruel businessmen. Rico moves up in gangland because he is more calculating and strategic in taking over the group of gangsters he was first recruited into the gange. And that signature epigram, delivered by Rico when he is shot at the end “Is this the end of Rico?” is voiced by Robinson in a tone that is both amazed at dying and querulous about even the possibility of death, and so Rico is even at death contemplating his own nature. It is therefore an ironic end of Robinson as a gangster figure in the parodic “Brother Orchid”, made in 1949, where a gangster hides himself as a monk and then changes himself into being a contemplative suggests that the film writer and director understood well enough at that time that this was also Robinson’s not so secret identity.
The contemplative quality is available in Robinson’s later work. He appeared in the teleplay version of Paddy Chayefsky’s “Middle of the Night'' (replaced by Fredric March in the movie version, for reasons of casting difficult to understand, given that both actors were very able and over the hill) playing what was then called a middle aged man who has an affair with his twenty-ish secretary. As one might expect in Chayefsky’s kitchen sink drama, there is no question here of exploitation. Rather, the poignancy of the melodrama consists of both participants being embarrassed that they were engaged with one another in part for sex, as the title indicates, something just merely human however the still prudish Fifties would regard as a kind of violation given the people both being indubitably respectable, and also just affectionate and respectful to one another despite their age differences. Robinson is presented (I saw the teleplay) as amused as well as embarrassed about the situation in which he finds himself. He knows that people will see him as a sybarite when he is just a man who finds himself to be in love. He shows himself as calm and reasonable even while anguished. A great performance in a play that echos similar themes of how Negro people at the time were also dicovered to be merely human. Chayefsky and Robinson had generalized the situation in the times of people now overcoming stereotypes whether of racism or ageism..
I want to commend to you a movie Robinson made in what we might call his middle period: neither gangster nor elder. It was Fritz Lang’s “Scarlet Street”, which is not generally admired as a work of art. Maybe its lurid title put people off when the movie was exactly what it was about: how to move from the respectable to the lurid. Lang begins his movie with a set piece that is toned down from what seem to me to be its German Expressionist roots: a dinner party of the well to do laugh and drink and the chief honcho gives Robinson a watch for his twenty five years of service and then goes off with a lovely in his limousine. The setting is already eerie because it is overdone in its naked reality of the relation between the rich and their minions. But Robinson is able to make the audience believe that the character is very grateful for the gift, which is clearly a petty reward for his twenty five years of diligence. But Robinson does convey that and what will happen to make him disenchanted or change his life course, which is what readers are set up to happen, given that this is a morality play and so the protagonist has to be challenged or, worse, disillusioned.
Needless to say, given German Expressionism, the cashier, a man of rectitude, meets a flashy woman who might be his unding, just as happens in “The Blue Angel”. All in all, scene after scene. The movie is difficult to watch because there is such a sense of doom, so much suspense about how the next sce will deteriorate. It is like Lang’s earlier masterpiece, “M”, in which a child murderer is hunted down to his inevitable doom, making the murderer himself shift from being a villian to a victim. Lang does this differently this time with a wonderful structural invention. Whereby usual movies require seventy or so scenes to make up a movie, in this movie combines a play with a movie because there are ten or so set scenes, each with its own mood, its own scenery, its own dialogue, as when robinson has a drink in a bar with Joan Bennett, before a transition moment and then being placed in a new scene. I don’t know why this innovation was not followed up, even though Hitchkock came close when he had “Rope” placed in a single set and “Rear Window” toys with a similar idea whereby Jimmy Stewart sits in a single scene, that of the camera man, watches the multiple scenes of those in the opposite apartments. When Grace Kelly climbs into one of those apartments, the plot suggests danger but the movie means she is moving into a different metaphysic from the contemplative observer to a protagonist.
Lang’s movie was constructed in an unusual way that crosses between a movie, which is ordinarily set to include some seventy or so shots, and a stage play, which has just a few sets that can sometimes be opened up for a movie but are clearly a stage play long on dialogue rather than scenery or action. Lang uses just a few sets: his apartment, the lovenest apartment, the office, the restaurant or two towards the beginning and the train and exterior at the end, each one of these containing its significant and pointed dialogue. I don’t know why that film structure was not imitated in later films.Maybe wartime meant that resources were limited, but Lang could fill up a place with items. When Robinson washes the dishes while wearing his wife’s apron, he unplugs the toaster from an electrical plug in a ceiling light fixture, and so indicates how shabby is the life his family leads. Those who prey on him are slovenly, the kitchen filled with dirty dishes and pots, so as to betoken their moral slovenliness.
The dramatic story of “Scarlet Street” has multiple plots each one told quickly and moving on to the next one, as if they were Chaucer stories, but all of them tied into larcenous hearts even the last one, when Robinson is left with only a cheap irony as the substitute or ending for the was in which the nature of life lets everyone down in their crummy attempt to make out a life and Robinson just trudges off into the snowy street. These stories are very well crafted by Dudley Nichols, a prominent film writer of the time, who also did “Bringing Up Baby”, “Stagecoach”, and “Pinky”. The first of these is the love scam. Joan Bennett, abused but in love with the heel Dan Duryea (one of those great bad guys), decides to exploit the naive man Robinson plays, who is besotted with her. He steals money to give her a love nest that, unbeknownst, Duryea and Bennett will live in, hidden from his shrewish wife on the excuse that he will do his paintings there rather than her decide to throw out art materials. So there might be a story whereby Robinson gives more and more money and becomes ever more desperate and so he is ruined by his love. But that is not what happens. Instead the story shifts from the love scam to the art scam. Robinson is discovered to have real talent but rather than Duryea becoming a kind of agent, intimidating Robinson into allowing him to sell his wares, Duryea pretends that his girlfriend is the painter, just allowing Robinson to make his paintings. There is no reason to be fraudulent except that these two people don’t know how to do otherwise. Then there is the bigamy scam. The wife’s ex husband shows up to exploit money from Robinson so that he can leave Robinson alone, even though Robinson now no longer has to stay with his wife because her first husband is alive. Robinson has evolved enough into deceit that he allows the first husband to be discovered with the wife so that Robinson is now free to marry Bennett. He has moved into larcenous behavior from stealing money to arranging events to suit his plans. Then there is the murder plot, he killing bennett because he has found out about her relationship with Duryea and more than that because she has berated him for not being manly enough. Words can hurt and have consequences. Then Robinson allows Duryea to go to the chair for the murder and is himself ever condemned to wander the role of a lost soul for having caused the death of two people, he no longer even caring that the best of his paintings is sold for a very hefty sum. The irony is cheap because Robinson is burdened by all the events that occurred and out of which he lost control, every fate burdened by circumstance and ill feeling. A very Expressionist ending.
What puts together this motley crew is Robinson himself, the strong line-through of the various stories. His nuanced, calm delivery of his lines makes him both sympathetic and explanatory. When a friend comes to visit Robinson’s home when he is doing the dishes, Robinson explains in a bemused, ironic and resigned way how difficult it is to be henpecked by his wife. He explains eloquently to his love interest what it is to be an artist in a way that sounds fresh and enthusiastic, even as Bennett, masterfully done, sounds canned when she repeats what Robinson has said about art. Robinson can display numerous facial expressions in his mug-like face, as when he shifts from astonishment to anger just before he murders his Desdemona, as if he had been long schooled in how to convey emotions in the silent films. And I don’t know anyone who, at the end of the movie, trudges through the snow in a baleful pose and a step. Just masterful. You identify with him throughout, even if he has become a double murderer, as if fate had done it when it was willfulness that did it all, however dreadful were the circumstances that put him so much into a mess. The lot of life for many people is pretty bad, and tends to get worse, and that is no Hollywood ending. Melodrama is a guilty pleasure in that it indulges the feeling of sorrow about the hero and anger against the villain, as if the world weren’t really all that clearcut, even though, in fact, melodrama is a valid way to understand life and its emotions.