Fate draws together four disparate ‘angels’ on a dismal, rainy night in New York City and weaves a fairytale of redemption that can only exist on the screen. Mousey Charles Engle (John Qualen) has embezzled from his domineering employer in an effort to win back his unfaithful wife. Contemplating suicide, he takes himself out for one last night on the town where he meets slick grifter Bill O’Brien (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.) and his latest pick-up, naive Nina Barona (Rita Hayworth), an out of work Russian ‘dancer’. Bill connives to fleece Engle in a crooked poker game not realizing he’s all but broke. Enter Gene Gibbons (Thomas Mitchell), a drunken, once-renowned playwright, who attempts to rewrite each of their stories to give them all a happy ending.
Gibbons concocts a plan that will let Engle to win just enough from the rigged game to repay his boss, but allow him to escape without the hoods realizing they’ve been taken. The catch is that it requires the players act out their parts with a precision that their lives have never had.
Mitchell, Qualen, Fairbanks Jr. & Hayworth
Angels Over Broadway (1940) (also called Before I Die) was nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for Hollywood’s top script doctor and screenwriter, Ben Hecht. It was the first of two co-directing collaborations between Hecht and acclaimed cinematographer Lee Garmes. Garmes was a genius at creating an impossibly dream-like reality through his camera lens and won an Oscar working with Josef von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich on Shanghai Express (1932). Only his soft-focus style could have a created a gossamer vision of a corrupt world in which broken dreams and lives could be remade.
Hecht was a top Broadway playwright (e.g., The Front Page (1928) with Charles MacArthur) before he was lured to Hollywood where he wrote the stories or screenplays for a number of classic films (Viva Villa!, 1934; The Scoundrel, 1935; Stagecoach, 1939; Notorious, 1946). He understood the seedy, often corrupt world that put fantasies on the stage and screen for the public to lose themselves in. When Thomas Mitchell describes his restaurant surroundings as “… one of the musical graveyards of the town. Caters to zombies hopping around with dead hearts and price tags for souls”, Hecht is describing the Entertainment Business.
The caustic edge to Hecht’s dialogue was likely enhanced coming as it was one year after Gone With The Wind (1939) swept the Oscar’s. Hecht famously rewrote its script, but having received no screen credit, saw his own screenplay (with MacArthur) for Wuthering Heights (1939) lose to the blockbuster. Similarly, Garmes is credited with filming most of the first hour of Gone With The Wind only to see its Oscar for best cinematography go to Ernest Haller and Ray Rennahan. It’s easy to imagine these two talented, but disgruntled artists wanting to take the industry down a notch.
This leaves the panicked Nina and Bill to try to pull off the poker game double-cross even as the wheels come off the departed Gibbons' plan. If this was a film noir (a genre only beginning to solidify in 1940), all of our remaining heroes would end up dead or worse – left alive to continue their loveless, hopeless existence. Anticipating a classic Film Noir trope, the film opens with the voice over narration of a down on his luck, rain-soaked, Fairbanks huddled in his trench coat on Broadway recounting the story of his sorry life. In this one scene Hecht and Garmes set the template for every film noir hero who was to follow throughout the rest of the 40’s.
Fortunately for Engle (literally ‘angel’ in German), Nina and Bill, Hecht has written a better ending for them all. Although things do not go as planned, the plot resolves with Engle avoiding jail, and Bill and Nina coming together (was there ever any doubt?).
By 1940, Rita Hayworth’s star was on the rise. She had a minor role in Only Angels Have Wings (1939), but was about to achieve greater acclaim next to James Cagney in Strawberry Blonde (1941). In Angels Over Broadway, Rita gets to show off her comedic abilities in her first leading role in an A picture. The breathless, slightly ditsy, curvaceous Nina Barona anticipates Marilyn Monroe’s bombshell persona that was still a decade away.
The category for Angels Over Broadway is not easy to pigeon-hole. Drama-like, its themes are dark, dealing with potential suicide and lives that should be in despair, but it never approaches melodrama. Even when Nina muses that she "never knew anyone who wanted to die. Except myself", it does not seem to prophesize any real danger for her. Neither is the film a comedy, although it has many comedic moments. Farce-like in places, it is probably best considered a fantasy, if only for its upbeat ending – improbable in real life, but the real currency of Hollywood. Despite the biting nature of much of Hecht’s dialogue, he still knows to give the audience what they want.
Let’s leave the final summation of the film to Thomas Mitchell’s Gene Gibbons:
"A tragic tale, brother. A little confused, and badly constructed."
Perhaps a bit harsh in my opinion, but a fitting epitaph for an enjoyable film.
IS ANGELS OVER BROADWAY WORTH MY TIME? Reviews for this film are mixed, but I enjoyed the well-crafted dialogue delivered by interesting characters. Everyone here is a caricature, but we’ve all met someone like them, even given the implausibility that Hayworth or Fairbanks Jr could ever be the losers that they are written as. The plot is secondary to the individual scenes, but each is gorgeously composed by Lee Garmes. At only 79 minutes, it’s a breezy romp that also features a number of good moments from the cast of minor players.
AVAILABILITY: Still available on DVD and some streaming services.
ANGELS OVER BROADWAY. Columbia Pictures. 1940. Starring Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Thomas Mitchell, Rita Hayworth. John Qualen. Written by Ben Hecht. Cinematography by Lee Garmes. Music by George Antheil. Co-directed by Ben Hecht and Garmes. 79 min.
