Big Brown Eyes

Raoul Walsh's Big Brown Eyes is an above average programmer from 1936. The film mixes crime and comedy in a spritely 77 minutes. Big Brown Eyes features a romantic twosome of Joan Bennett and Cary Grant playing, respectively a manicurist and a police detective. The film feels off the cuff, concocted because two stars were available and needed a project that could be shot on the Paramount lot. However, despite (or because) of this, the film display the director's raffish charm and still underrated talents. 

Walsh helped write the screenplay, something he had done since the silent era, but abandoned soon after. The script has a lot of slang and rat-a-tat-tat patter, which both Bennett and Grant deliver with aplomb, full of ejaculations like "How's it, babe" and "Take a walk, flatfoot." Bennett and Grant seem relaxed with each other, Grant much less stiff than he was in most films earlier in the decade. Walsh has Bennett repeat a line from She Done Him Wrong, Grant's breakthrough film. Walsh had just directed Mae West in Klondike Annie and never took himself too seriously. You won't learn about film art if you read Walsh's autobiography, Each Man In His Time, but you will enjoy yourself and relish the talents of a master fabulist. Big Brown Eyes goes unmentioned, but so do most of the 140 films he directed.

The villains are well played by Walter Pidgeon and Lloyd Nolan. I enjoyed seeing Nolan as an up and comer, long before his talents calcified on television. Nolan ends up shooting a baby to death in the film, albeit accidently, but his character is oblivious to morality. The juxtaposition of heinous crime with humor may have contributed to Big Brown Eye's commercial failure, but it is consistent the the contradictory impulse of Walsh. As Jack Pickford allegedly said of Walsh, "Your idea of light comedy is to burn down a whorehouse."

For a maker of rugged adventures, Walsh was unusually sensitive to his actresses. Bennett is shown throughout to be certainly equal and maybe superior to Grant in acumen and ability. Bennett's character cracks the case and wins the guy. This is in part because Bennett was a bigger star than Grant at the time (but not for long), but also because of Walsh's even-handedness with the sexes. When Bennett lose her job as a manicurist, Grant is supportive of her new career in journalism and takes pride in her professionalism. This is not proclaimed as some progressive notion, but is embedded snugly in the film as part of the director's ethos.

Maybe I enjoyed Big Brown Eyes so much because I saw it on the heels of the woeful (and three hours long) Babylon. I certainly prefer Walsh's termite art approach as compared to Damian Chazelle's white elephant. The opening of Big Brown Eyes, which introduces the main characters and establishes the film's tone in a breezy minute, encapsulates Walsh's gifts. A 270 degree pan which traverses the salon where Bennett works, is followed by a montage of tilted angle close-ups in which the crew and customers of the salon comment in staccato like fashion on the film's plot. The device of the clientele and staff acting as a Greek chorus is repeated through the course of the film, adding to the sense of urban sophistication and syncopation. Unlike Chazelle's frenzied attempts at bravura camera movements, Walsh's far more economical and effective technique is off the cuff and tossed off, a cynosure of directorial assurance.

Big Brown Eyes is a Walter Wanger production. By 1940, Bennett had divorced her second husband and married Wanger. She turned into a brunette and gave her career a second wind as a femme fatale in Scarlet Street, Secret Beyond the Door, and The Reckless Moment, all produced by Wanger. However, a scandal in 1951, Wanger in a jealous rage shot Bennett's agent, Jennings Lang, sent Wanger to jail for four months. Bennett was unfairly branded with the scarlet A and her career never recovered. I remember seeing her on television's Dark Shadows and knowing, even in my youth, that this was the fate of a fallen star. After he was sprung, Wanger bounced back with worthy films such as Riot in Cell Block 11 and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, though he was ultimately undone by the debacle of Cleopatra. Still, very few producers had helped make as many masterpieces: in addition to the films listed above, he produced Queen Christina, History is Made at Night, Stagecoach, Foreign Correspondent, The Long Voyage Home, Canyon Passage, and The Black Book. Big Brown Eyes is a trifle compared to these, but still worth a gander.