In some ways, it’s all about Isabel Jewell. At 26, the young actress was already a seasoned trouper, with years of stock companies, several Broadway shows and several early talkies already on her résumé when she landed the role of Bessie Green, the law firm’s ineffably chatty switchboard operator in William Wyler’s 1933 film version of Elmer Rice’s Counsellor-at-Law. The large-cast, frenetically fast-moving play, which Rice had directed himself, had been a success on Broadway; it had spawned companies in Chicago and on the West Coast. Its large population had been a godsend for stage actors in those dark Depression days, when the WPA had only just been created and the Federal Theatre Project was not yet born. Rice’s play—with its manic veers from farcical to tragic, its smart-mouthed nonstop talk in a panoply of urban dialects, and its hurry-scurrying of characters from one extreme situation to the next—seemed to contain all of post-Crash Manhattan in one tidy, intense capsule. It had a Manhattan heart, too, aching with the hope that everything would turn out right, but worldly-wise enough to face the fact that things usually don’t. It carried the essence of what makes everyone love and hate New York.
And when Wyler filmed it, there, at its center, sat Isabel Jewell at her switchboard, headset on, plugging and re-plugging connections while she rattled on nonstop, never slackening her pace or missing a vocal nuance as she switched from telling off her ex-boyfriend to cooing at one of the firm’s valued clients. “Simon and Tedesco”—that’s the name of the law firm and the line Bessie repeats most often. After the movie’s release in 1933, the line became a catchphrase in her intonation: “Simon and Te-DES-co!” My Aunt Ida, a teenage movie fan in Chicago during those early Depression years, could still repeat it, in Jewell’s exact inflections, some 40 years later. And I’m sure she wasn’t the only one: The Kino edition of the film’s DVD release used the phrase as the soundbite on its menu: If you didn’t hit “Play” immediately, you’d go mad from hearing it over and over.
Fortunately, later editions of the DVD eschew that dangerous choice, and these days, downloads, not DVDs, are the rule anyway. So Counsellor-at-Law can be enjoyed without cloying, and the phrase can be relished as Rice intended—as a ribbon that weaves through the hectic to-and-fro of life in a big-city law office, curbing but never drowning out the multitude of urban voices that make Counsellor-at-Law such a zesty, thickly piled Dagwood sandwich of New York lives.
The star performer at the law firm of Simon & Tedesco is also the movie’s star. Universal, which produced the film, initially had not wanted John Barrymore for this role. At 51, the good looks and fervid emotional expression that had made the great stage star a silent-film heartthrob, playing everything from Sherlock Holmes to Don Juan, were beginning to fade. In addition, his increasingly heavy drinking caused him to have trouble remembering lines—a problem intensified by his open contempt for the movie business and the guff he was often obliged to spout onscreen.
Universal’s first choice for the lead role of George Simon, the Lower East Side slum kid who had battled his way up to superstar lawyerdom, was Paul Muni, who had triumphed in the role on Broadway. But Muni, ironically, was reluctant to have his triumph encased in more permanent form: He was afraid it would hurt his burgeoning film career to be typecast. So he turned down his chance to show posterity what he could have done with the role. And, after all, Barrymore was Barrymore, not chopped liver. His scenes with Garbo in Grand Hotel the year before had shown that he could still stoke the old fire in the right circumstances. So they signed him.
Barrymore didn’t make life easy for Wyler. Universal, like most studios, was in shaky financial straits in 1932–33. They had paid a hefty price ($150K, a record at the time) for the rights to Rice’s play, and Barrymore’s star salary ($25K/week) was another drain on the budget. Wyler was under orders to shoot his scenes as quickly as possible. Inevitably, delays occurred: On some occasions, the makeup department had to tape Barrymore’s jowls because his face was puffy from the previous night’s drinking. His muffed lines, given Rice’s fast-talking and verbally intricate script, often required multiple takes; in several scenes, Wyler had to resort to cue cards held just off-camera.
But they not only got through it; they triumphed. Whatever pains it cost, Barrymore’s performance as we see it is consummate, even breathtaking—a majestic tribute to the art of acting on film. However many takes it may have required, he never misses a nuance, squeezing every drop of juice out of one of the juiciest roles an American actor ever had. His energy, his emotional tone, the dazzling palette of vocal colors that he commands supply the constant wonderment that’s one of the joys of great theater. Just to take two tiny instances, watch him with the husband-killer for whom he’s just won an acquittal (played by Mayo Methot, her own combative marriage to Humphrey Bogart still five years in the future), and shortly afterward with his high-society wife (Doris Kenyon) as he leans over and sniffs her perfume. Yes, without doubt, this is great acting, and the breakneck pace that Wyler compels makes it seem all the greater.
Barrymore’s acting is by no means the picture’s only delight. He may be its driving force, as George Simon’s ambition is the force that keeps the law firm bustling, but so much else is going on. We hear just enough to tickle our interest of the big cases that George Simon deals with—the Chapman murder, the Richter divorce, the Crayfield will—to learn how the firm operates and what sort of matters it handles. But what we watch, whether in Simon’s private office or in the waiting room and the hallway to which Wyler cleverly keeps cutting, is the intricate life of the office itself: the interactions of staff, hangers-on, clients, and intruders. The promising young attorney (Marvin Kline) who’s hopelessly smitten with Simon’s adoring secretary (Bebe Daniels); the messenger and reformed petty crook (J. Hammond Dailey) who remembers Simon’s mother (Clara Langsner) from the old tenement days. The bustling office is so crowded that it’s sometimes hard to pin down an actor’s name on the cast list: Who plays the wiseass mail boy forever getting fresh with Bessie when he passes the switchboard? Or the Italian immigrant who engages in furious expostulations with John Tedesco (Onslow Stevens)? At some moments, the entire population of New York City, from bluebloods to the poverty-stricken, seems crammed into Counsellor-at-Law’s waiting room.
The large cast it demands makes Rice’s play very hard to revive, though there was an excellent production off-Broadway in 2004, in which John Rubenstein did handsomely by the lead role. One wonders, though, why it has never attracted the makers of Broadway musicals, in which a large cast is less of a liability. It seems to offer both the comic fun and the dramatic excitement that musicals demand these days, plus opportunities for all the modes of social awareness that a contemporary musical requires. Class consciousness and assimilation are the twin themes that run through Rice’s narrative. On the one hand, George Simon is confronted by people, still poor, who come from the same tenement life he has escaped (one of them even calls him a traitor to his class); on the other hand, he must confront the privilege-based hauteur of his high-born wife and the snobbery of her fellow WASPs, who are perfectly willing to stretch a legal or moral principle for their own kind, but object vociferously when Jews, Irishmen, or Italians try to get away with the same thing. The two sides get very neatly summed up in a silent waiting-room confrontation between two young actors who went on to later careers on the other side of the camera: the fervent young Communist Harry Becker, played by Vincent Sherman, and Cora Simon’s snotty, spoiled son by her first marriage, played by the then–child actor Richard Quine. Both Sherman and Quine came from theatrical backgrounds (Quine, at 13, was already an experienced performer in vaudeville and on radio); both went on to highly successful careers directing big-budget, glossy films. (And both also became notorious for having affairs with their leading ladies.)
Sherman’s stage experience had included a stint playing Harry Becker in the Chicago company of Counsellor-at-Law, which brings up another notable aspect of Wyler’s film: No fewer than 10 of its actors were re-creating roles they had played on the stage, most of them in the original Broadway production. That their roles are mostly small does not detract from the authenticity they bring: This is a film in which the sense of life has been captured and preserved from the original stage production. When Charlie (Dailey) gabs about the old days with Simon’s mother (Langsner), or T.H. Manning, as the ward boss Pete Malone, spouts Yiddish phrases in a thick Irish brogue, you catch the scent of the wonderful, crazy ethnic mix that is New York, and of the way it poured onto the stage in that time when the Broadway stage was less glossily machine-made and more directly in tune with its audiences.
Wyler enables, and even enlivens, these stage-bred bits by not letting them slow down his cinematic juggernaut. He balances the camera’s moves, and its cuts, from inner office to outer office to waiting room to hallway, with moments when the camera holds still and the people do the moving—secretaries and messengers shuttling from one office or one desk to another, clients or intruders being escorted in or out of somebody’s office. Often, Norbert Brodine’s camera views the action in deep focus, with the object of our interest at the far end of the room, framed by another figure standing closer to us. As a variant on this, Wyler lets us see encounters down-screen while someone else hurries past in the background. He gives us the busyness of this busy office, as well as the somewhat oppressive sense, highly germane to the story, that far too many of the characters know (or could easily find out) intimate details of each other’s affairs. While upholding the principle of legal confidentiality, George Simon has brought up to Fifth Avenue with him a flavor of the tenements, where everybody knows everybody else’s business, just as the mail clerk knows all about Bessie’s dating history, while Cora and her society pal Roy Darwin (the young Melvyn Douglas) know all about the cases they would prefer George not to take. “I thought I told you never to leave me alone with that woman,” George tells his loyal secretary, after disentangling himself from the overly grateful acquitted murderess. But later he will accuse the same secretary of trying to spy on him; lack of confidentiality is a double-edged sword.
Though Wyler’s breakthrough to fame didn’t come till three years later, with his Oscar-winning Dodsworth (1936), his confident handling of Counsellor-at-Law’s flood of material makes clear that he was already a master. He had a lot to prove: A distant relative of Universal’s boss, “Uncle Carl” Laemmle, he had worked his way up in the studio from messenger boy to one of its resident directors. His gift for bringing plays to life on the screen, and for sculpting great performances, are already in play here – as is the deep focus practice he is often said to have worked out with his cameraman on later films, Gregg Toland. The blend of inspiration and meticulous craftsmanship that enlivens his great later works—besides Dodsworth, they include Dead End (1937), The Letter (1940), The Little Foxes (1941), The Heiress (1949), and Detective Story (1951)—can already be felt working near peak level here. A man with a passion for exactitude, Wyler probably didn’t even mind all the retakes Barrymore required; they gave him the chance to get every detail right.
The cast list that unrolls in the film’s opening credits, headed by Barrymore, looks as tall as an office skyscraper, and in the very first shot of the movie proper, the camera tilts up to show us the exterior of such a skyscraper, hurtling toward an upper floor, at which point it cuts to the hallway, where a bank of elevators lets off those heading to the offices of Simon & Tedesco. Later in the film, someone on the firm’s staff will come to work feeling queasy because she has seen a man jump out of another skyscraper’s window. While we think that this may be a dream or an exaggeration—or that her queasiness has really been brought on by the outrageous things we’ve seen her order for lunch—the narrative moves toward affirming the truth of what she says. Before the end, someone in this office will be at the window contemplating suicide. Manic and hectic, New York is full of stories that can drive people to, and sometimes over, the edge. There were no temperature-controlled buildings then, and windows on even a building’s highest floors could be opened to let in fresh air—or to let a desperate soul out, to crash to the ground. This too is part of the frenzied, exhilarating life of a great city, bulging with excess. Counsellor-at-Law captures that excess in all its glory. In the slang of the period, when people said something was “too much,” they meant that it was too wonderful, too astonishing, too perfect. Counsellor-at-Law is all that and more—one of the quintessential New York films.
Read more Feingold on Old Movies for Theater Lovers:
Preston Sturges’ ‘The Palm Beach Story’
Charles Laughton’s ‘The Night of the Hunter’
Clarence Brown’s ‘Intruder in the Dust’
Rouben Mamoulian’s ‘Love Me Tonight’
Ernst Lubitsch’s ‘To Be or Not to Be’
Marcel Carné’s ‘Children of Paradise’
