The Polly Walters Film Festival: "Young Bride" and "American Madness"

Polly Walters and Joan Blondell in "Bleaches"

Of all the actors and actresses who appeared in 1930s movies, Polly Walters (1913-1994) was certainly one of them.

Although she appeared in small roles in only a handful of movies between 1931-32, Walters made an impression with her blonde hair, deadpan style and Betty Boop-ish, singsong voice. She was usually a working-class girl -- a waitress, a hotel maid, a manicurist, a switchboard operator -- with a working-class name like Mabel, Ethel, Daisy or Gladys.

Born Maude Walters in Zanesville, Ohio, our heroine trained as a dancer and made her way to Broadway, appearing in several productions during the late 1920s. Then came a stage stint as Eddie Cantor's straightwoman before Warner Bros. signed her to a contract in 1931.

At Warner's, Walters appeared in three James Cagney films -- "Taxi," "Smart Money" and "Blonde Crazy." In "Blonde Crazy," she plays a hotel maid who warns another maid -- the film's female lead, Joan Blondell -- to stay away from Cagney, as a bellhop who knows all the angles:



Walters also appeared in Warner films with Douglas Fairbanks Jr. ("Union Depot"), Loretta Young ("Play-Girl"), Edward G. Robinson ("Five Star Final") and Warren William ("The Mouthpiece" and "Beauty and the Boss").

For the most part, her Warner roles were bits. It wasn't until she was lent out to other studios that Walters played roles that were actually important to the plot.

In the 1932 RKO film "Young Bride," for instance, she is Daisy, the streetwise best friend of innocent heroine Allie (Helen Twelvetrees). They work together as librarians, and Daisy introduces Allie to nogoodnik Charlie (Eric Linden). Allie ends up marrying Charlie while Daisy ends up with Pete (Cliff "Ukelele Ike" Edwards), and doing lots of heavy partying:



Then in one of her last films, Frank Capra's "American Madness," released by Columbia the same year, Walters's switchboard operator character starts the gossip that threatens to bring down a bank headed by honest Thomas Dickson (Walter Huston):



After appearances in only 17 films, Walters left Hollywood in 1933 and went back to Broadway, appearing in a production called "She Loves Me Not" with Burgess Meredith. After that, there was talk of returning to Hollywood, but nothing materialized. From 1936-37 Walters was on stage in "Red, Hot and Blue" with Jimmy Durante, Ethel Merman and a young Bob Hope. Then came roles in plays that ran only a few performances -- her last work was in a 1942 production called "The Life of Reilly" that closed quickly.

For the next 50-odd years, Walters lived a quiet life in New York City -- she had no other film, play or TV credits. Maybe she found a job as a switchboard operator.  

"Union Depot" and the Warner Regulars

In their underrated 1978 film "Movie Movie" director Stanley Donen and screenwriters Larry Gelbart and Sheldon Keller paid homage to the 1930s movies they loved as kids. To do this, Gelbart and Keller wrote two 45-minute movies -- one a black-and-white boxing film, the other a musical in color -- so that "Movie Movie" took the form of a double feature. More importantly, as in the 1930s when studios had stock companies -- players under contract -- it was a double feature with the same actors (including Art Carney, George C. Scott, Eli Wallach, Red Buttons and Trish Van Devere), but in different roles. The movie even had a preview of coming attractions -- a World War I movie ("War at its best!") with all the same actors as the other two movies.

In 1932's "Union Depot" we get to see a good chunk of the Warner stock company from the early 1930s, including Frank McHugh, Guy Kibbee, Alan Hale and David Landau. They all have business of one sort or another within the majestic marble structure where people are coming and going while announcements of train departures bounce off the walls. The movie opens with a tracking/crane shot to show you the whole enchilada:



More than other Hollywood studios, Warner Bros. had a uniquely working-class viewpoint, and in this movie it's expressed by the fact that the station is teeming with immigrants, from Eastern Europeans -- as seen above -- to Asians:



Our hero is Chic (pronounced "chick," not "cheek"), played by Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. He and his sidekick, Scratch (Kibbee), have just been released from the local hoosegow on a vagrancy charge, and they're looking to raise a few bucks. Chic gets lucky when he "inherits" a suit from a drunken traveler (McHugh, doing one of his specialties) with money in the pocket. He buys himself dinner, and then he sees a forlorn-looking Ruth (Joan Blondell) on a bench. She's a chorus girl who broke her ankle; now she's recovered, but the show has moved on without her, and she needs money to catch a train to Salt Lake City, where she can get her job back. At the same time, Scratch has come across a claim check. Chic redeems it, and gets a violin case -- filled with money!

Meanwhile, the guy who belongs to the case (Hale) is trying to get it back, and he'll get tough if he has to, see? And Ruth is trying to escape the clutches of a creepy old guy (see creep at right) who developed the hots for her during her recovery. And the money turns out to be counterfeit, and Chic is arrested by the feds, leading to a pretty cool chase through the train yards as he tries to capture the real bad guy, Hale:



And one thing's for sure -- if you didn't like the Warner regulars in these roles, you'd be seeing them in something different within a few weeks. In 1932 McHugh appeared in eight films -- he played a mechanic in "The Crowd Roars," a frantic new father in "Life Begins" and a wisecracking reporter in "Blessed Event," among others. Kibbee was just as busy, going from a drunk hobo here to a corrupt cop in "Big City Blues" to a bartender in "The Mouthpiece" to James Cagney's father in "The Crowd Roars."

Here are the full credits for "Union Depot."