The Lemon Drop Kid (1934) User Reviews

Lee Tracy Does Not Sing "Silver Bells"

[boblipton · 6/10 · 10 July 2019]

Racetrack tout Lee Tracy gets a final warning from the cops at the track. He then swindles Robert McWade out of a C-note and has to run for it to a tiny town where Henry B. Walthall's daughter, Helen Mack and he soon fall in love. However, when she's expecting their first child, she develops complications, and employer Clarence Wilson won't lend him the money to get her the high-powered medical she needs. So Tracy steals it from him. She dies giving birth to their son, and he goes to prison.

That's the set-up and it certainly doesn't sound much like the Bob Hope Christmas movie that introduced "Silver Bells." Instead, the musical numbers are Tracy in a banjo duet of "Dinah" and William Frawley singing "Carolina in the Morning" -- he had introduced the Gus Kahn standard in THE PASSING PARADE OF 1922 at the Wintergarden Theater.

It's from a story by Damon Runyon, but although Tracy slings the lingo in beginning, it still settles down to a pure melodrama, where the script pulls its emotional punches. There's a soppy streak of sentimentality in all Runyon, the sense that his characters are essentially harmless and funny. Here, it's the "real" world that's cruel and hard, especially when Tracy's kid turns out to be Baby Leroy, who as a lover of WC. Fields' comedy, I have a strong dislike for.

A Fine Little Film

[bensonj · 20 March 2011]

This was released in September 1934, so even the announcement of pregnancy has to be done in inaudible whispers in the ear, but it still has the essential element of the pre-Code era, that open style and loose narrative structure that doesn't try to "lead" the viewer. This isn't a "comedy," a "romance," or a "drama." It has elements of all three but it's a film to be taken as a totality that goes from one moment to another in unexpected ways and doesn't have a predictable plot. At first we see Lee Tracy at the track, trading wisecracks with the law and fleecing suckers. When the cops are after him, he takes off with an aging drunk, Henry Walthall, to his home town. There Tracy meets Walthall's daughter Helen Mack, and they fall in love. Tracy settles down with a store job and things seem fine. Tracy good-naturedly chafes at the job, but this isn't one of those tales about the footloose guy who loves the gal but can't settle down. Tracy's a guy in charge of his life; he understands that Mack is worth settling down for, and does what's necessary without it clipping his breezy nature. But then she dies in childbirth. There's a an amazing scene after she dies that demonstrates the range of the Tracy persona, which always had depth of character under the wisecracks. He stands there in shock, alone with the baby, and muses, "What's it all about?" There's just so many great things about the film, starting with Frawley. Frawley was said to be acerbic and unpleasant in person, but it's hard to believe he was all that bad, his performances are so detailed, zesty, affectionate, and real. Here, he plays a race-track sharp, but with a stylish command of language that gets him through any scrape. At one point he sits at the piano and does a wonderful rendition of "Carolina in the Morning" for Baby LeRoy that brought applause from the Film Forum audience. (It's said that he claimed to have introduced the song in "The Passing Show of 1922" at the Winter Garden.) Minna Gombell, an underrated performer of the era, is fine as Frawley's girlfriend/wife, and the other supporting players are uniformly good. Tracy uses track slang throughout, and at one point uses classic rhyming slang, the very same heard in British working-class films of the sixties. There's another musical sequence when Tracy and Mack have a party to celebrate being married for six months. It's a large, happy, raucous party which is another indicator that Tracy has adjusted to married life but is still his spirited self. Eddie Peabody does a banjo solo, and then he and Tracy play a banjo duet, each strumming on one banjo and playing the chords on the other. The way they're sitting you barely notice that they're intertwined like that. Very high energy numbers. The film as a whole, though, is rather low key, not intent on proving anything, but just telling out its tale. The comedy, the romance, the drama are all done with a rare good nature. The closest thing to a nasty character is Clarence Wilson as the owner of the retail store where Tracy and Mack work, but it's a reflexive sort of nastiness that no one bothers about too much. Today's audiences might be puzzled by this film that never tells them what to think or to expect, but it's a fine little film.

A film with multiple personalities!

[mark.waltz · 4/10 · 3 May 2010]

Don't go into this film expecting anything close to the 1951 comedy with Bob Hope, Marilyn Maxwell, William Frawley and Jane Darwell. The only thing it has in common is the lemon drop eating leading character and William Frawley, playing quite a different character than he did 17 years later. In that one, he was closer to Fred Mertz than he is here. There's no sweet old ladies home here and a group of gruff New Yorkers on the street singing "Silver Bells". This is a film seeking identity as either a comedy or drama, and it can't make up its mind. For the first quarter, its a very entertaining comedy, then switches to sappy drama that destroys the mood it earlier set up. As it followed "Lady For a Day" on the screen as a Damon Runyeon story, it had to have a mixture of both, but unfortunately, once the film switches geers, there is no comedy whatsoever until William Frawley pops up towards the end.

The story is this: Wally Brooks (Lee Tracy) is a character hanging around the racetrack who tries to con people into betting on losers. He is initially seen having bilked an old lady, and later does so with a crusty millionaire where the horse ironically wins. Brooks goes on the run, and ends up in a small town working for nasty Clarence Wilson, falling in love with pretty Helen Mack. When they marry, she gives birth to a baby boy (Baby LeRoy later in the film) and dies. Having robbed Wilson to help his wife get the medical attention she needs, Brooks must now go to prison. A compassionate warden sees beyond Brooks' negative attitude and introduces him to his infant son who is in an orphaned asylum. Brooks vows to turn his life around and is paroled. By this time, the child has been adopted (secretly by old pal Frawley and his new wife in order to later reunite papa and son) and Brooks is livid to find his son missing. Eventually, a happy ending is in order which will bring either tears or groans depending on the mood of the viewer.

Lee Tracy was the king of the double talk, playing reporters, agents, politicians and gamblers who could talk his way out of trouble in almost every situation. He gets some great comic lines here at the beginning, especially dealing with his wife's pal, small town phone operator Minna Gombell, the stereotypical depression era wisecracking blonde with the heart of gold. But there's little opportunity for their interactions to continue as the film goes from Damon Runyeon street reality to Fannie Hurst style soap opera. Only here, it's not Irene Dunne or Margaret Sullavan suffering over the loss of a lover or child, it's a supposedly hard-boiled male city slicker. Helen Mack suffers and dies nobly (as she did in several other films around this time), and Tracy must hide his emotions in order to save his macho pride. Frawley, as always, is amusing, and Clarence Wilson, probably the ugliest character actor in films, plays one of his typical smarmy businessmen with coal where his heart should be. Why Wilson never played Scrooge on screen is beyond me. There's also an amusing performance by Robert McWade as the ailing millionaire that Tracy gets $100 out of at the racetrack. Henry B. Walthall is present as Mack's dipsomaniac father whom Tracy befriends after going on the run. Kitty Kelly, unrelated to the infamous biographer of the Reagans and Frank Sinatra, is present as the woman whom Frawley marries in order to adopt Baby LeRoy. The tyke is seen here as a sweet young thing who for a change isn't getting kicked or fed alcohol by W.C. Fields. There is an amusing scene with Frawley singing to the boy that first amuses him then brings him to tears.

For the first 20 minutes of the film, I was sure I was getting into an overlooked comic gem, but as the film switched geers, so did my feelings towards it. It is like going up a huge hill on a roller-coaster only to find out that the first downward spiral is only a four-foot drop.

Flawed, but this 'Lemon' is still sweet

[F Gwynplaine MacIntyre · 8/10 · 27 April 2010]

This 1934 film version of Damon Runyon's story 'The Lemon Drop Kid' has been legally suppressed, due to Paramount's remake starring Bob Hope. The remake has its merits, but this '34 version is closer to Runyon's original plot. Hope played the remake for broad comedy: this version starts out going for broad laughs, then moves into drama and finally pathos.

I have a high regard for Runyon's work but I don't actually enjoy reading it. His characters speak in deeply contrived slang and implausible grammar. This script lumbers Tracy with a steady stream of dialogue that's both too slangy and not believable enough. When a major catastrophe befalls him, instead of yelling some simple interjection, he actually says "This is my unlucky day, or I don't know a mare from a gelding." For most of the movie, he talks like that.

I was also intrigued, but not entirely impressed, that Tracy's character here kept speaking in rhyming slang, such as saying "willows" when he means "pillows". Rhyming slang is used by racetrack touts in Britain and Australia, but I've never heard anyone in the States use it. Also, Tracy keeps defining his slang terms for the benefit of the other characters (and the audience), when the whole point of rhyming slang is to baffle outsiders.

There's a splendid performance by William Frawley as a tout nicknamed 'the Professor'. Frawley gets to warble a song at one point, and he does it very well ... though he accompanies his vocals with those incredibly bad hand gestures that some movie actors use when they pretend to be playing piano. There's also a fine performance by Minna Gombell in what could've been a stereotypical "seen it all, dearie" role. Splendid work by director "Mickey" Neilan.

There's a too-brief performance by vaudeville banjoist Eddie Peabody, and I was amused to see Kitty Kelly playing with a Sam Loyd puzzle. Black actor Sam McDaniel shows up as Robert McWade's bathchair attendant, and I was delighted that McDaniel was permitted to play a realistic black man with nary a "Yassuh". Speaking of which: why do the fictional characters in this movie (and so many other 1930s Hollywood movies) persist in using mispronunciations such as 'deef' for 'deaf' and 'raddio' for 'radio'? I've never heard an actual American use either of those mispronunciations.

SPOILERS AHEAD: One key event, an armed robbery, takes place offscreen ... possibly to help maintain sympathy for Tracy's character. He's cried the Lemon Drop Kid because he keeps eating lemon-flavoured acid drops, yet (even when he has no money) Tracy seems to have an infinite supply of these in his pocket, as if he's Harpo Marx. I disliked a scene in which the Lemon Drop Kid, a widower, gets arrested in the presence of his infant son. He's understandably concerned for himself, yet neither he nor the arresting officers seem to think about who will take care of the infant: Baby LeRoy is just left there while the Lemon Drop Kid gets hauled off to chokey. Earlier, Helen Mack gives a deeply touching performance as Tracy's wife, who gives birth to their child but knows she's going to die from the complications.

There are a couple of awkward time-jumps in this movie, which takes place over the course of about three years. The transition from frothy comedy to deep pathos is a bit disorienting, but Tracy (an under-rated actor) handles it splendidly. My rating for this one is 8 out of 10.