Phooey
His voice comes out of a secret hole between his eyes, that honking New Yawkese of Allen Jenkins – built like a barrel of pickles that fell off the truck on Pearl Street, always avid to be abused in knuckleheaded sidekick roles. Meanwhile, audiences remain free to unconsciously admire that desperate toehold in the coveted world of jobs and three squares a day. For Jenkins plays more than just a “good mug.”
As one of many limpets on the skyrocketing career of James Cagney, he’s privileged and condemned at once, the ideal stand-in for America’s ignominious splashdown. A titan posing under the guise of dull and beaten personas – that nose – like a doorman’s shoehorn in a closet at the Hotel Dixie. Oh Talkies; you were so young and unapologetic. Studios well knew that the minor was major then – we needed comic proxies, “lesser” stars that could reveal us where we lived.
Enter Allen Jenkins. Doomed to conceal lissome grace behind pratfalls and black eyes while playing odd man out in any Hollywood mise en scene… My hero’s comically beautiful head tragically made for taking lumps, he was born Alfred McConegal, a living compound myth whose body labored in shipyards before his shadow hit screens.
See him in Jimmy the Gent (1934) and glom genius flirting with Cagney’s own, a great manic-depression of exploding/imploding rotating choreography. As “Lou,” Jenkins falls backwards into our collective aspiration, the silent prayer that, one-day, we too will be kicked around by some boss. Spasms are synchronized with America’s general lurch, a new and unspoken genre I call the “Job Movie” in which steady work is normal, even funny.
Though I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry.
A whole caterwauling universe has lost its nerve, and Jenkins is there, taking lumps for all the shlumps. Cagney’s titular character plays jazz-drum on Lou’s head; it’s like watching two specimens of thwarted evolution savagely jitterbug for a nation on the bum, entertainment worthy of “The Dirty Thirties.” To me, their dance symbolizes a period of time that produced enormous pain and, through its vital blend of languages and media, lyricism to match that pain.
Jenkins squawks like a dying pig on a kazoo. Amplified thousands of times by the Vitaphone, synchronized sound – “yaps,” “frails,” “pippins,” bromides,” “taxi dancers” – staggering ‘round his dome each time he’s knocked unconscious, like so many drunken stars. My solidarity wells up to meet the poor slob, dodging blows aimed at his beezer, sly Punchinello whose true domain is cloaked in subterfuge.
Not to mention his gift for playing rage – the man can give himself a stroke on command. Apoplexy and an outsized melon, as if the zeitgeist imprisoned there might suddenly spew yachts, bassoons, and polar bears. I’ll speak in classy nomenclature since Jenkins belongs to a “constellation” of stars – stars schooled not to soar but to lurch – strutting for a hot second, swacked-to-the-gills as Lord of Misrule, our communal wretchedness appearing momentarily in the shape of a person. Trumpeting a thousand inbred tongues, understood from margin to margin across the U.S. via All Talking Pictures – a shlump is born!
He was, like the man said, ubiquitous.
by Daniel Riccuito
Illustration by Tony Millionaire