Johnny Eager

Hi Aki,

Johnny Eager is a gangster movie from MGM and director Mervyn LeRoy who did the original Little Caesar and did a ton of gangsters for warners in the early 30s.

JE is from 1942 and the story as you’ll see could go comedy or drama:

Johnny Eager is an ex-con out on parole, who works as a cabdriver. He tries to stay legal, though he has to support his mom and his neice. Meanwhile a society coed, studying sociology, gets interested in his case – she’s doing a term paper on convicts on parole.

What nobody knows is that Johnny is really just as big a gambler and gangster as ever; that he only goes to see his ma and neice when he gets a tip that the parole officers are paying him a ‘surprise’ visit at home.

The scene at his ‘home’ is really funny. Played strictly for laughs, it gives you a good idea what the movie might have been had it been a comedy out and out, like several Warners mid-30s post-gangster movies like Brother Orchid.

But Leroy plays this one straight for drama. there’s a good deal of incipient freudian analysis going on, though not so open and explicit as postwar movies would engage in.

Johnny is a thorough rat. The society girl (Lana Turner, age 22 and hotter than in any other movie I’ve ever seen her in) falls in love with him even though her stepfather is the tough special prosecutor keeping Johnny’s dog track from opening. So Johnny plays a gag on the girl: a gangster comes in to attack Johnny, they fight in front of the girl, and to save Johnny she shoots the gangster in the back and kills him.

Johnny then uses this to blackmail the prosecutor into giving the OK to the dog track, and he’s rolling in money.

Of course the gangster wasn’t shot at all. But the girl doesn’t know it, she’s broken hearted.

Meanwhile Johnny’s ‘associates’ are as usual trying to pull a double-cross on him, and he has to kill a few to stay on top.

He has a buddy, a drunken sidekick who uses big words (Van Heflin, in a show-stealing role that won an Oscar) who represents his conscience. He has a dog, a broken down greyhound who had a couple world records years ago, but whose legs are shot so he can’t race anymore.

Johnny all the way through shows no pity to anybody. People who do he calls ‘suckers’ until he finally begins to see the light, play with his dog, and goes to tell the society girl the truth, that it was all a gag, the guy she killed isn’t hurt at all. But she doesn’t believe him, she thinks he’s lying to spare her feelings.

So Johnny arranges for the girl and her ex-boyfriend to come to the seedy side of town to see the guy, who has betrayed Johnny. Johnny intends to show him to the girl and then kill him, and send the girl off with her ex to have a good life. And it all goes OK, except he doesn’t kill the guy with the first shot, and others come to help the guy, and Johnny gets killed too.

Robert Taylor plays Johnny in a sweet role where he gets to act tough, do comedy, play a nice guy, cry, – the works.

The movie is an excellent example of the best of the golden age, a genre picture that expertly uses its stars, is beautifully shot with great production values, and helps make stars out of Lana Turner and Van Heflin.

Leroy is listed as ‘director’ and there’s another guy who gets ‘producer’ credit, but right under the main title it says, ‘A Mervyn leRoy Production’ so I imagine the truth is that leroy got to do whatever he wanted. (within the strict control of the front office, of course) and he gave the studio choice product in return.

(written around 9 March 2009)