Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the film adaptation of Damon Runyon’s Big Street.
Big Street, starring Lucille Ball, Henry Fonda, produced by Damon Runyon, RKO, 1942
Every working class neighborhood has produced (and produces), if those that I have lived in are indicative, its fair share of drifters, grifters, lamsters, short moneymen, wise guys and just plain big talkers. In classical Marxist speak this element is called the lumpenproletariat and in political terms is a drag on the class struggle and the feeding grounds for fueling reactionary and counter-revolutionary movements. In short, bad news.
I am willing to bet, and make that bet 6/5, that any interested reader looking at this review to get the 'skinny' on Damon Runyon's short stories of film, here “Big Street,” probably did not bargain for the above analysis. Fair enough. Okay, we will suspend disbelief about the true nature of these types for as long as it takes to get through this collection. Damon Runyon has taken that collection of drifters, grifters and con artists and their `dolls' and headquartered them, mainly in one place, New York's Broadway, the Great White Way of the 1920's and 1930's, and given us some very memorable stories about the sometimes hilarious, sometimes poignant as here, trials and tribulations of this motley crew.
Runyon's great art is to have an ear for the kind of dialogue that those on the hustle would produce if such a rogue's gallery of lumpen types as the Hot Horse Herbies, Skys, Sam the Gonolphs, Bookie Bobbies and the rest of the cock-eyed tribe ever had time to talk to each other. It is no secret that every little sub-culture has its own mores, language and sense of what passes for honor. Runyon takes this and exaggerates the effect but also in many cases puts an edge on it. “The Big Street” has a tragic- comedic starting off as a goof on café society busboy Henry Fonda’s off-beat ‘crush” on torch singer Lucille Ball. And Ms. Ball is nothing but a, well, nothing but… The story line is driven by her gold-digger crazed desires to hit the Mayfair swells big time, her fall (literally) and her dreams of grandeur (small-sized) which our boy Henry, against his usual strong and sturdy type-casting, raises heaven and earth (and maybe the Holland Tunnel) to carry out. And in the end he cannot do more than see that her last wish is carried out.
Some commentators have argued that Runyon was just a cynic and had contempt for his characters (or for the real life characters that he based them on). Maybe, so. But if you want to look at a time and place that never really existed, except as caricature, then this is your stop. By the way- Buddy, can you spare a dime?
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