Love Bug

Filmmaker and film fan Jean-Pierre Melville, with his thick accent, pronounced the name Fronk McHyoog. Which somehow feels right.

Frank McHugh, essentially a short, doughy man with a nasal whine of a voice, somehow embodies the contrast between pre-code and post-code cinema better than anyone. Mae West is the usual example trotted out whenever a newbie needs elucidation, and her case is certainly illustrative: what the production code did to her is a lot like what happens to Cartman in the South Park movie, fitted with a V-chip to prevent “inappropriate” behaviour or comments, both figures burn up impotently from the heat lightning of their undiminished inner obscenity.

But McHugh is different, even more extreme in a way. Before the code he was a schlubby wiseacre, dirty-minded, insinuating, and a jittery ball of toxic-strength vim. He’s like another modern cartoon, Homer Simpson, in being nothing but a collection of minor vices hyped up to extravagant levels, but is distinguished by that nervous energy. Photographs of the sleepy-eyed patsy do not capture this vibrating core, although the ability of his wide, manic grin to force those white jowls to defy gravity hints at it. His hair, tightly curled to resemble a field of black rubble, often greased into choppy waves, balances atop a blobby, shiny face and nothing hints at the trouble he can cause.

McHugh, faced with poor material, did not have the luxury of the leading man’s response—keep your head down and barrel through—as an unrepentant character man, he felt he had to bring the entertainment even if the script offered none. In other words, he can be a bit annoying, and Warners often cast him as annoying characters to capitalize on this. His wheezing laugh, a single, dawn-out “Heeeee…” with a dying fade that insinuates and gloats, was pumped out too often per movie, in too many movies. But he had more cards up his sleeve.

As an expectant father in Life Begins (1932), McHugh is comic relief as usual, but brings such a truckload of perspiring anxiety to the table that the laughter breaks off in your throat. In Heat Lightning he’s an implausible kept man, and makes this position credible by suggesting he can’t quite believe it himself. Harmless as a second-newspaperman-from-the-left or even a junior mobster, his character names strongly suggest roles tailored for his plebeian appeal: Slug, Speed, Fish, Chub, Spud, Pinkie, Greasy, Droopy, Snap, Toodles, Gaga, even McCue. Only McHugh could suggest at once a slug, a fish, a pinkie and a potato. And only he could simultaneously evoke the contradictory qualities of grease, droop and snap.

The extent to which the production code de-ballsed McHugh can be seen from the fact that Leo McCarey was able to twice cast him as a priest called Father O’Dowd (in Going My Way and the rather different, unrelated My Son John, a McCarthy era bit of reds-under-the-beds paranoia). This would have been unthinkable before Will Hays got his hooks in Hollywood. McHugh was still playing low-lifes, but the material was so anodyne his wolf leer and filthy twinkle couldn’t really seep through the censor’s filter. It makes the few years when this smutty Irishman could strut and fret his seventy minutes before the camera, trammeled by decency yet still somehow suggesting a direct line to the world of Tijuana bible trousers-round-ankles grimy biology.

by David Cairns

Illustration by Tony Millionaire