'“A Tough Guy, Eh?”
We tolerate Chester Morris. I don’t know that we love him.
Part of the problem is that the golden age of pre-code cinema for Morris is also the golden age for Jimmy Cagney, William Powell, Warren William, actors who sparkle with wit, agility, charm, energy, qualities poor Chester can approximate but never truly own. At this time, Clark Gable is not yet King of Hollywood, but he’s got something: a kind of gangling, lupine, on-the-make gusto. Bogart’s glory days are still ahead of him too, but at least they arrived: Morris sank further into B-movie territory, and not even good B’s, mostly. Have you ever tried to watch one of those Boston Blackie films? They had Robert Florey, Edward Dmytryk, and Budd Boetticher as directors, but any charm or personality those luminaries channelled towards the films got sucked down the Morris charisma funnel. Latterly, Boston Blackie was all that Morris did, and he wasn’t even very good at it.
Studio boss Jack Warner coveted Gable’s macho suavity and thought maybe C.M. could achieve it: maybe with the right moustache. But the material just wasn’t there, and maybe that was the problem: as rats and shitheels, which he played frequently, Morris had some conviction and suited the part. As leading man, he looked like he would lead you somewhere you didn’t particularly want to go. A moustache would’ve presented the real possibility of Morris being upstaged by his own upper lip.
Should we blame the physiognomy? Morris has a big beachball face, a couple sizes too big for his head, so it seems like roundness is the platonic ideal it’s aiming for, but he also has a little sharp hooked beak of a nose, and a jutting chin. Like somebody tried to make a noble, heroic Mr Potato Head by substituting those two features. His narrow eyes should convey steely determination, but in fact it’s much more credible seeing him twirled around Jean Harlow’s pinky in Red Headed Woman than as ex-crook turned detective Boston Blackie. More interesting, anyway. Maybe the role of a real leading man is to make us forget that the role he’s playing isn’t as interesting as the character parts and villains. Whereas Morris needed something interesting to do, preferably something appalling.
He makes a decent neurotic gangster in Blind Alley (1939), a Freudian hostage drama where he can stagger about in German expressionist nightmare sequences, but it’s still tempting to run the movie in your head with Bogart subbed in. Morris only has one role, or one scene, really, where he stamps a unique and indispensable impression on screen history.
In The Bat Whispers (1930) – spoiler alert! but really, the plot isn’t the point of this one, and anyway, it’s eighty-two years old, how come you haven’t seen it yet? – Morris is unmasked as the titular caped criminal, and delivers a defiant piece to camera before being led away in chains. Lit from below like a kid with a flashlight telling a ghost story at camp, Morris musters a performance style so far over the top it pierces the stratosphere and finds itself suspended in a zero-gravity realm of Total Possibility. “The Bat ALWAYS flies at NIGHT – and always in a Straight Line!” he insists, stressing every syllable as if it were his last. In terms of making an impression, this really was his last shot, though why he never went for broke like that again is a mystery. Maybe he hated what that performance looked like onscreen. It’s easier to hate something interesting than something dull.
We tolerate Chester Morris: we don’t hate him.
by David Cairns