They Drive By Night (1940)

Film: They Drive By Night (1940)
Stars: George Raft, Ann Sheridan, Ida Lupino, Humphrey Bogart, Gale Page, Alan Hale Sr.
Director: Raoul Walsh
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2019 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress of Hollywood's Golden Age.  This month, our focus is on Ida Lupino-click here to learn more about Ms. Lupino (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

We will start out our month-long look at Ida Lupino a few years into her career in Hollywood.  Lupino was an actress the movies always struggled to know what to do with-beautiful & talented, but not an actress that seemed to take off with critics at all, the closest she probably came to graduating from (to quote Lupino herself) "the poor man's Bette Davis" to a proper star was in 1940/1941, when she had back-to-back hits for Warner Brothers, both opposite someone who would graduate to Davis's level, Humphrey Bogart.  In what I believe is a first for this series, we'll be hearkening back to one of our former "Saturday Stars" today with the return of actress Ann Sheridan, whom we had as the very first star in our series in January, as she'll play opposite Lupino in this melodrama about truck drivers (no, that's not a typo).

(Spoilers Ahead) The film focuses on two brothers: Joe (Raft) and Paul (Bogart), both of whom are down-on-their-luck and always one day ahead of loan sharks.  Joe has big dreams for his trucking game, wanting to turn this into a major enterprise that'll show the guys who constantly put him down he is a big deal, while Paul seems to just want to get out of the business alive, and let his wife (Page) have the baby he claims they can't afford.  Joe meets a beautiful-but-sassy waitress named Cassie (Sheridan), and falls in love with her.  The only problem is his boss's (Hale) wife Lana (Lupino) is also madly in love with Joe, and doesn't understand why he doesn't return her advances.  After Paul is injured in a driving accident, losing his right arm, Joe is brought on to work in his office (at Lana's insistence) as she feels she can seduce him there.  When that doesn't work, Lana kills her husband, assuming that if she's not married Joe will fall for her, but it turns out he's just interested in working his way up in the business, and proposes to Cassie.  Afterwards, Lana claims Joe insisted that she kill her husband so that he could have the business (and her), but she breaks down and confesses on the stand, having gone mad, and claims an insanity defense.  As a result, Joe gets the business and Cassie, becoming the big shot he always dreamed of, while his brother Paul announces in the closing scene that his wife is pregnant, fulfilling his dreams.

The movie is odd-melodramas like this don't usually take place in such a hyper-masculine (particularly in the 1940's) industry as trucking but it totally works.  They Drive by Night is a well-written (four-time Oscar nominee Jerry Wald penned the script) and well-acted piece of dramatics, and proves a film's subject matter ultimately doesn't matter if the movie itself is strong (side note: I always get asked for my favorite genres or film subject matter-They Drive by Night is a good reason why I say "it doesn't matter as long as the movie is good").  It's a briskly-paced picture, and one that shows off in some ways why Bogart would be a future superstar, commanding the screen in every one he's in (he's decidedly a supporting player here, though, so don't be fooled).  Bogart would in the next year surpass Raft in the movie pantheon forever when Raft would turn down two of the biggest films of Bogart's career: High Sierra and The Maltese Falcon, two decisions that would essentially cement his place in film lore as perhaps the actor with the worst taste in scripts (rumor has it that he also turned down Casablanca, another iconic Bogart role, but that feels more fanciful than the other two).

But what of our star, Ida Lupino?  She's awesome in this movie.  At first I was kind of curious if Sheridan would overpower her (Sheridan's also good...in fact other than Raft who feels a bit dry as the stoic lead, everyone is putting in a winner here), but Lupino steals the picture.  As a jealous, bored housewife she's frothy & campy, giving the best performance Joan Crawford never gave when she kills her husband and then has to confess in a manic fit of laughter on the stand that she did it.  The movie's ending is cute and sweet, but it hardly matters because at that point Lupino has committed grand theft robbery as our now-absent villain.  She's arguably third lead (I could see this going either direction), but in our modern, more "category fraud"-friendly era, she'd certainly be getting a Supporting Actress nomination at the Oscars for this work, and it'd be well-earned, though it'd preclude her from this series (which only focuses on actresses Oscar forgot).  November is one of those months with five Saturday's, and if this is what Lupino can deliver, I'm excited I pencilled her in for the extra title.