Linda’s Paycheck Movie

Here’s Miss Linda…

I’ll be honest: The only Linda Darnell movie I’ve ever seen up until now was The Song Of Bernadette, a film that was not without scandal. Right before that, however, Darnell made 1943’s City Without Men, a movie that seemed to have a lot going for it but didn’t make as big of a splash as it could have.

City Without Men opens at Port Columbia, five months before Pearl Harbor, when Coast Guard member Tom Adams (Michael Dwane) finds out he’s been offered a commission in the Navy. Things seem to be going his way, as he’s not only got his sights set on being an admiral, but his girlfriend, Nancy Johnson (Linda Darnell) has agreed to marry him after he’s sworn into the Navy.

On Tom’s last run before he leaves, he finds two Japanese men climbing into a rowboat from an English ship, the Hanseatic. These two men attempt to force Tom to take them further out to sea, although how far they think they’ll get in a patrol boat is a bit murky. Either way, Tom gets picked up by Naval personnel, who don’t believe his story about the Japanese and arrest him. Long story short, Tom is put on trial for helping the two Japanese men, who lie about Tom’s conduct, and Tom is sentenced to five years in the federal prison at Blackport.

Nancy, who’s positive Tom is innocent, goes to Blackport to see him. Tom is, naturally, depressed and angry about his situation. He wants Nancy to go home and move on with her life, but Nancy doesn’t agree with that. She moves into a boardinghouse overlooking the prison, where a group of seven women whose husbands, sons, or boyfriends are also in prison, live while they wait for visiting days. Even the proprietess, Mrs. Barton’s (Sara Allgood) husband is in for life. Everything is planned around what happens in the prison, right down to the timing of the meals.

All the characters seem to be types, from hard-boiled Elsie (Constance Worth) to graciously cheating cardsharp Dora (Margaret Hamilton) to kind but slightly daffy Winnie (Doris Dudley) to faded Mrs. Slade (Rosemary DeCamp). There’s nothing different about them; they just have guys in prison, that’s all. The one exception is Gwen (Leslie Brooks), who’s got a guy on the side, Mr. Peters (Don DeFore) a sap of a fellow who shall hereafter be referred to as Oh Mr. Peters Honey, and who comes by on the pretext of reading the house’s electric meter.

Nancy, who’s a teacher, tries to get a job at the local school, but the superintendant won’t hire her because of Tom being in prison. Instead, she works at the laundry with the other ladies from the boardinghouse and spends her free time dogging Blackport’s Judge Malloy (Edgar Buchanan) to free Tom from prison. Malloy, who used to be a prestigious attorney, has fallen from grace and is now more of a barfly than legal counsel, but Nancy doesn’t let up. It doesn’t matter that everyone thinks it’s hopeless.

Meanwhile, the other ladies figure out a way to spirit their guys out of prison and they want Tom to drive the getaway boat. They don’t care that they’re letting themselves in for more tragedy; they’re just desperate and done with the whole prison thing.

In the midst of all the chaos Gwen decides to skip out on the plan to be with Oh Mr. Peters Honey and literally gets kicked downstairs for her turncoatedness. Later on Oh Mr. Peters Honey comes back looking for her and serves up an unspoken moral: Lending company money to one’s girlfriend is a bad idea, especially if one’s girlfriend is already cheating on her convicted felon of a husband.

Did I give something away? Sorry, but it’s sort of worth it because it’s the closest any of the boardinghouse women have to a fleshed-out subplot, and even then it goes kersplat. As Pat Benatar famously sang, “Love is a battlefield.”

Speaking of which, Linda finds an important news item in the local paper, which she takes to Judge Malloy at the bar. Whether or not it snaps him out of his stupor remains to be seen.

In case it isn’t already crystal clear, City Without Men is a pretty weak movie. Let’s start off with Tom’s arc: How is it that this guy has a great Coast Guard record that is enough to land him a commission in the Navy, yet everyone’s so quick to believe two Japanese randos over him? And no one questions why these fellas were out in the ocean in the first place? That makes absolutely no sense, especially in a time when Japanese nationals were held in high suspicion by the military.

Granted, innocent people do wind up in prison and jail, even in the United States, but when someone works in the military, or for the government, the vast majority of what they do that could be dicey from a legal standpoint is documented, such as injuries received on the job. Even someone who works part-time like I do has to document everything. It’s a CYB thing.

Equally nonsensical is Nancy’s trouble finding employment as a teacher. Blackport is a prison town so pretty much everyone has a connection to the prison in some way, which means Tom’s being an inmate shouldn’t have been a mark against Nancy. It feels like a desperate attempt to give her more time with the ladies from the boardinghouse.

The overall impression that I got was that these actors were entirely wasted in their roles. They weren’t given much of anything to do, even Leslie Brooks’ Gwen and her Oh Mr. Peters Honey. The one who stood out the slightest bit was Rosemary DeCamp, whose Mrs. Slade stayed at the boardinghouse while her son was on Death Row. She doesn’t wear any makeup for the part, she doesn’t say much, but when the bell rings announcing her son’s death, her face is a study in despair and heartbreak.

Linda Darnell is equally underutilized as Nancy, but she gives it her all, and hers was the face that showed up the most when the film was promoted, although Leslie Brooks had her turn as well. Many of the actors on the film, including Darnell, were loaned to Columbia from other studios for the movie, and Columbia did their darndest to promote the heck out of it.

Everything was fair game, including gross oversale and a treatise in Screenland about crying in movies. Showman’s Trade Review, in an unusual show of originality, cautioned theater owners and news outlets, “Be careful in your advertising not to let your patrons think the title refers to Washington. Keep exploitation on the cast names, which are good.”

When it came down to it, the movie did modestly well, pulling in $1.8M at the box office. The critics gave it such descriptors as “minor Columbia action quickie,” or as Motion Picture Reviews called it, “an unpleasant melodrama…that has no value but manages to hold moderate interest.”

In the end, City Without Men seemed to be what we would now call a paycheck picture, but amazingly enough, it’s never fallen into public domain, although unrestored prints can be found. Columbia still owns the rights to the film and even released it on DVD in 2004. I wonder if they see something the rest of us don’t.

For more Linda Darnell, please pay a visit to Samantha at Musings of A Classic Film Addict. Thanks for hosting this, Samantha–it was fun! Thanks for reading, all, and I hope to see you all on Tuesday for a new installment of “During World War Two.”

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