Warren William, Evil Capitalist Asshole
By all accounts, Warren William was a very quiet, reserved, and pleasant fellow. He was raised in a small town in Minnesota, he fought in World War I, and in his spare time he was an amateur inventor. He remained married to one woman his entire life. His career was never threatened by explosive drunken rampages at popular Hollywood nightspots or dark rumors of weekly bestial orgies at his mansion. In short, he was an incredibly boring man. Given the sort of nasty, raucous behavior on display we’ve come to think of when we think of pre-Code films, it hardly seems fitting that a man of William’s demeanor would ever come to be known as the King of the Pre-Codes, but there was a reason for that.
The pre-Code era offered up the usual motley parade of villainous types: killers, thieves, racketeers, two-bit chiselers, dirty cops, bought judges, sinister clergymen, run of the mill cheating husbands and wives, gold-diggers, and sleazy newspapermen, but to audiences of the times, there was one villain who trumped them all, who was in fact far more heinous and hateful than all those other namby-pamby ne’er-do-wells combined—The Businessman.
Contemporary films like Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street and a thousand others may portray the arrogantly wealthy as despicable but nevertheless still fetishize their power, greed, and toys at the same time (“Sure he’s a motherfucker, but look at that suit! Damn!”) Things were different in the early ’30s.
The hungry, desperate, and frightened Audience of the Unemployed went to the movies for distraction and escapism, sure (as Preston Sturges noted at the end of Sullivan’s Travels), but if you can mix a little catharsis in there as well, all the better. And if the catharsis in question took place at the expense of a crooked asshole businessman, better still. Screen gangsters may have been after exactly the same things their more legitimate socially-sanctioned capitalistic counterparts were, and in even more greedy, underhanded and brutal a manner, but the former were romanticized instead of vilified the way the latter were (in part anyway) because real-life gangsters like Capone weren’t the ones who sat in lavish corner offices signing the papers and playing with the numbers that ripped jobs away from millions and sold the whole fucking game down the river. Plus the gangsters were a hell of a lot more honest about what they were up to than those other hypocritical, sanctimonious vipers.
Over a career that spanned roughly 20 years, William played his share of sympathetic characters in the likes of Three on a Match, Imitation of Life, and The Man in the Iron Mask, as well as portraying decidedly upstanding types Perry Mason, Philo Vance, and Michael Laniard, aka The Lone Wolf. In the early ’30s, however, his tall stature, Aryan looks, and a stentorian voice ready-made for the talkies together made him an obvious choice to play ruthless, predatory businessmen on the prowl for both money and every young girl in the vicinity. If Warner Brothers needed a soul-crushing son of a bitch in a silk suit, they knew who to call. Screw his kind and gentle off-screen reputation, in 1932 and ’33, the onscreen Warren William was the embodiment of everything mainstream America hated, and no one did it better. Despite a prolific career and appearances in a good handful of classic films, William’s reputation as King of the Pre-Codes came as the result of only a tiny handful of films.
Although not nearly as salacious as the title might imply, 1931’s Under Eighteen is still a weird little gold-digger picture starring Marian Marsh as a poor factory seamstress. She sees marriage as her only way out, a ticket to wealth and happiness, but then notes that even after getting married her sister has remained poor and miserable. So in a twisted bit of curious logic, she nevertheless starts putting the moves on the slick, sleazy and wealthy Raymond Harding (William) not so much for herself, but to snag enough dough so her sister can get a divorce. Although here he’s as much target as he is predator, it marks the beginning of Williams’ being typecast as a rich prick who would never turn up his nose at the chance to take advantage of a desperate teenage girl.
His screen persona was more solidly established the following year in Edgar Selwyn’s Skyscraper Souls. Although plenty of little soap operas are being played out within the 100-story office building that houses the Seaside Bank, none are quite as compelling as bank president David White’s (William) cold, backstabbing drive to gain full control of the entire building, stopping at nothing just to be able to say the building is his.
He doesn’t exactly play a businessman in that same year’s The Mouthpiece, but he sure acts like one. Very loosely based on the career of famed mob lawyer Bill Fallon, here William plays Vince Day, a true blue prosecutor who becomes a Syndicate mouthpiece after sending an innocent man to the chair. In the courtroom he’s as ruthless as any banker, using any dirty trick in the book to get his client off the hook. It was another character who had audiences hissing, given he was proving (as they long suspected) that “justice” was merely a meaningless game, and those with the most money always won. (The film would be remade as Illegal in 1955 with a much more sympathetic Edward G. Robinson in the lead.) ’32 was a busy year for William, and in The Match King (cited by some, if not me in particular, as his finest role) he plays yet another character loosely based on a real bastard—in this case famed swindler Ivan Krueger. William is Paul Kroll, a janitor with some smarts and larceny to him who lies, cheats, and cons his way up the corporate ladder until finally taking full control of his uncle’s match company. Although more sympathetic than many of his other characters who seem born into power, the film still worked as an illustration that those who have money and influence likely got it by being a conniving rat.
For me, the culmination of William’s reign as King of the Depression-Era Villains was in ’33’s Roy Del Ruth’s Employee’s Entrance opposite Loretta Young. Banks and match companies may have been alien institutions to Depression audiences, but they all knew the department stores and the wage slaves who worked there. Here William is at his most sadistic as Kurt Anderson, the tyrannical manager of a New York department store who knows full well his employees are desperate and frightened, would do anything, put up with anything, to hold onto their jobs, so he easily wields sex as power and casts his workers away like so much trash when he’s done with them. It was not only a representation of the retail world then and now, but William portrayed a boss we’ve all had at one time or another, but writ large, leaving the film just as relevant 80 years later. More deeply than that, and not to go all fruity here, it was at the time an easily comprehended sketch of what the mechanics of capitalism had become in the depths of the Depression, and showed audiences who their real enemy was (but they pretty much knew that already).
From the mid-‘30s until his death in 1948, William slipped into generally more genial supporting roles and uncomplicated, inoffensive leads in tedious mystery series, and eventually faded away to become little more than a B-film footnote. But for a couple years there, for one dark and searing moment, he was the King.
by Jim Knipfel (illustration by Tony Millionaire)