Released in 1932, “Afraid to Talk” is an astonishingly cynical melodrama from the pre-Production Code enforcement era, full of retorts such as: “If he squawks we’ll give him a lead massage!”
The nominally happy ending doesn’t so much clear the air of political corruption as toss a coverlet over it for safekeeping. A tightly packed 72 minutes, director Edward L. Cahn’s picture deserves the classification of “true rarity.” Featuring a high-quality 35 mm print bearing the dear old Universal logo, its one-time-only “Revivals & Rediscoveries” program screening Friday at Northwestern University’s Block Cinema is welcome indeed.
The most pungent of the pre-Code films appear to us today like specters from the bottom of the Depression. “Afraid to Talk” (also known by the original play’s title “Merry-Go-Round”) opens with forgotten men on a bread line, hashing over the latest news ticker headlines concerning winter unemployment relief and low voter turnout. “It’s comin’, I tell ya, it’s comin’,” one rummy mutters, revolution on the brain.
The story relies on a wrong-place, wrong-time scenario in which a hotel bellhop witnesses a gangland killing and fingers the killer (a rival gangster) under pressure from civic officials, most of whom have ties to the local racketeers. The guilty party, however, controls the marionette strings, and eventually the bellhop is framed for the murder himself.
Cahn’s film is no “Scarface” in terms of technique, but it’s full of juice and jaundice. Edward G. Arnold has a basso profundo field day as Jig Skelli, the chief gangster, and the way he pit-bulls his line readings it’s an ideal complement to Louis Calhern’s slithery vocal charm as the morally bankrupt assistant district attorney. In the play, the bellhop met a darker end. But even the movie’s sanitized finale remains skeptical about the possibility of true reform given the way things are in America in 1932, a time — as one politician seeking re-election phrases it, sanctimoniously, in a speech — very different from the days when “‘Americanism’ was a word without its present hollow ring.”
Writing in the Chicago Daily Tribune, whoever was using the pseudonym “Mae Tinee” reviewing “Afraid to Talk” described the picture as “ugly and revolting every step of the way … should any local bandits care to see themselves as others see them, the time is this week and the place is the State-Lake theater.” Earlier in ’32, many received the play’s off-Broadway premiere as an indictment of Manhattan and Tammany Hall political graft. The screenplay (like the play) locates the action in neither New York nor Chicago. Yet near the end, one character says to another: “Wanna put a dollar on the Cubs?”
The reply: “You don’t want me to take any sucker bets, do ya?”
“Afraid to Talk,” 7 p.m. Friday, Block Cinema, 40 Arts Circle Dr., Northwestern University, Evanston. $6. For more information, blockmuseum.northwestern.edu or 847-491-4000.
