Sorrowful Jones (1949).

I never knew he was British.  Not for the longest time, anyway.  This is something I found out about (or else my memory was jogged) just recently.  To tell you the truth, it still comes as a surprise to learn he wasn't born and raised here; and why shouldn't it?  Bob Hope is one of those names that sounds like it's got an Apple Pie baked into it somewhere.  The guy's voice even sounds like a cross between a Midwesterner with just the faintest hint of a New York Yankee drawl.  He had the kind of face you'd expect to greet you wearing a straw boater hat, grey spats, white shirt sleeves, and a red and white striped vest as he welcomed you to the Coney Island Pier.  It is just possible the guy could have held just such a job during his desperate and hungry years.  The man I'm talking about used to be referred to as America's Entertainer.  That's the title he was given by one of his official biographies, anyway.  I'm not sure who remembers him anymore, now.  In fact, his reputation seems to have reached a very interesting pinnacle.  I'm no longer certain what anyone thinks about Bob Hope anymore.  It's as if time and tide have rendered a once flesh and blood human being into a blank slate.  If Bob were here to read this, he'd probably make a joke about it.  That was his stock and trade, so far as he ever had a job aside from occasional bouts of employment from either the Army or the Oscars.  Whenever they needed someone to play the clown for the cameras, or lift the troops' spirits (usually with the help of the latest cover model) Bob was there.

It got to the point where both establishments where thinking of installing special revolving door entrances just for him.  The password for both joints was the same.  "Hello, I think you know me.  I'm Bing Crosby's golf caddy".  That's a jest, of course, yet it gives you an idea of the type of humor he was known for in his time.  Needless to say, Hope was a lot better at it than me.  Still the question remains.  Does anyone know him anymore?  Am I talking about someone who even existed?  Did I make that whole name up?  Here's what author John Steinbeck wrote about him in a newspaper dispatch that was compiled later on into a non-fiction collection titled Once There was a War.  "When the time for recognition of service to the nation in wartime comes to be considered, Bob Hope should be high on the list. This man drives himself and is driven. It is impossible to see how he can do so much, can cover so much ground, can work so hard, and can be so effective. He works month after month at a pace that would kill most people. Moving about the country in camps, airfields, billets, supply depots, and hospitals, you hear one thing consistently. Bob Hope is coming, or Bob Hope has been here.

"In some way he has caught the soldiers’ imagination. He gets laughter wherever he goes from men who need laughter. He has created a character for himself—that of the man who tries too hard and fails, and who boasts and is caught at it. His wit is caustic, but is never aimed at people, but at conditions and at ideas, and where he goes men roar with laughter and repeat his cracks for days afterward (78)".  The writer also offers this interesting bit of trivia about the entertainer.  "The Secretary of War is on an inspection tour, but it is Bob Hope who is expected and remembered (ibid)".  Fast forward to today, and all most of us can do is ask one simple question.  Mr. Steinbeck, who on Earth are you even talking about?  Come to think of it, who are you anyway?  What have you done that so important?  Anyway, why waste space on an old court jester?  That seems to be the opinion most folks would have about a name like Bob Hope, even if a lot of us can't find the right words to express it.  The basic meaning behind such questions is the same, "Why should I care"?  It brings to mind something Mark Twain said a long time ago.  He claimed that "Fame is a vapor".  To which most will ask, "Who's Mark Twain"?

As to the question of whether Bob Hope is a real person, the answer, in the strictest sense, is no.  There never was a real Bob Hope.  All that happened was that once upon a time, a Welsh stone mason named Henry Hope met a girl named Avis Townes.  He was a working stiff, and she was something of a theater brat, with what was, at the time, a steady career as a concert singer.  Perhaps to Henry's own surprise, Avis accepted his proposal, and they got married in the year 1890.  It was pretty good so far as married households went.  It was almost like that Chuck Berry song, the one that goes "C'est la vie, say the old folks.  It goes to show you never can tell".  The one hitch in this fairy tale was Henry's penchant for gambling his funds away on the race track.  Henry made his growing family into self-imposed exiles in the city of Cheltenham, which was all they could afford.  While there, in 1903, the couple welcomed their fifth child to whatever this is.  They named him Leslie Townes Hope.  It's not the most promising way to start a life.  That's the kind of name that will get you beat up, if you're not careful.  It almost goes without saying that as he began to come of age, young Leslie soon learned how to become a practiced brawler.  Before that, however, there was a change in the family's household fortunes.

Henry had a brother named Frank, and at the time of Leslie's birth, his uncle was holding down a steady job in Cleveland.  A bit of reading between the lines makes you sort of realize that in terms of family dynamics, Frank was always the reliable, dependable sibling who knew how to be a diligent worker, and hold on to a job.  Henry, meanwhile, seems to have been as close to a polar opposite black sheep as you can get without ever having the label handed to him.  Still, you've got to give Leslie's father some credit, he seemed determined to do right by his growing family.  So when the opportunity came to get some much needed income by moving to the United States to work alongside Frank, Henry made one of those decisions that seem pragmatic at first glance, and then later on reveal themselves to be a fateful turning point for the future of at least one of his children.  Henry Hope landed in the States sometime in 1904, just a year after Leslie's birth.  Despite his often lazy and irresponsible ways, Henry surprised perhaps even himself with a newfound ability to put his nose to the grindstone same as his brother, and slowly and surely began to stockpile enough money to send for the rest of the family to join him.

The reason for this newfound responsibility is obvious enough once you realize that with Frank breathing down his neck keeping an eagle eye on his brother, Henry was less prone to falling into his usual habits such as gambling, drinking, or girl chasing.  It was a lesson in humility for Leslie's father.  It might also have been proof to Henry just how much of a myth there was in the idea that hard work ennobles the soul.  All it did was make him feel thirsty and stifled in all sorts of ways.  He might even have felt a great deal of sympathy with another saying of Mark Twain's.  "It's always the early bird that gets the worm (I once knew a fella who tried it; got up at sunrise; the horse bit him).  Henry might have felt bitten, yet he also got the reward of being reunited with his family into the bargain.  The Hope clan even got the extra added bonus of soon being able to move into their own house.  The punchline that was lying in wait for Henry and Avis Hope came in the form of their own son, Leslie, and the way they raised him from a pup.  It was a textbook case of be careful what you wish for.  However, when you're dealing with people as headstrong as Mr. and Mrs. Hope, does it really make any true difference?

Whatever the case, while Henry Hope seems to have straightened up after his move to America, it couldn't erase his past as something of a vagabond rogue,  Avis, meanwhile, was still a theater brat at heart; one of life's great frustrated actresses.  This could be seen in the fact that not long after moving into their own American home, Ava made Henry buy her a piano that she could play around with and belt out some of the old music hall tunes she was most likely born and raised on.  It's a hell of a household situation for a child to be born into.  It's so out of the norm of the average American home that there's almost a case to be made for describing the Hope family as one of those odd chances where you get an entire clan made up of misfits of various stripes; each with their own ways of expressing some deep seated sense of malcontent.  For Henry, is was a long held desire to be the big shot man about town.  For Avis, it was her name (or any member of the Hope family) "up there" in bright lights on the stage.  This made for a very bohemian styled home life that had nowhere else to go except for rubbing off on the Hope children.  The good news in all this for Leslie Townes Hope is that his folks and siblings all seemed to belong to the rare positively charged version of the misfit tribe.

His parents doted on him, for one thing.  Nor was there any false notes in their love.  It also something they spread to all of their kids.  I was unable to find anything that would label them as bad parents.  Yes, they were oddballs, yet there's never anything really abusive about them that I could find, especially when the whole bunch got to the States.  Instead, it was all just a case of Mom and Dad channeling the youth that neither of them ever got a chance to misspend into more productive outlets for their kids.  In Leslie's case, this involved sooner or later getting bit by the same showbiz bug that infected his mother so long ago.  In most homes this kind of thing would single Les out as the runt of the litter.  In the Hope manse, however, he just made his folks proud.  With that type of encouragement under his hat, Leslie Townes soon found himself taking his chances in between dropping out of school forever and holding down a series of odd jobs by trying his hand at getting his start in the world of Vaudeville.  To give an idea of what this long vanished institution was like, imagine a bawdier version of The Muppet Show, except that unless someone like Edgar Bergen was onstage, there wasn't a puppet anywhere in sight.

It was a pretty ramshackle operation all around, and yet Vaudeville's circuit was the birthing ground for some of the biggest names in comedy during the Golden Age of Cinema.  The more you know the filmography of this era, the more impressive the list of names to come from Vaudeville sounds.  It included the likes of Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, George Burns and his wife, Gracie Allen, and their lifelong friend, Jack Benny.  Sooner or later, after a lot of dedicated hard work, Leslie Townes Hope was able to add his name to that impressive roster as well.  He had to find a better stage name for himself first, though.  It's the kind of thing that's probably not so much of a big deal now.  However, Henry and Avis's most talented son figured no one was ever going to put up with, much less remember a name like Leslie.  So after a bit of digging around for ideas, he settled on the moniker of Bob Hope.  The rest is pretty much history.  Finding the right name seems to have done a lot for Leslie Hope's confidence.  He began to get more laughs for his audience as he continued to workshop his material.  With greater laughs came greater notices, and his star continued its upwards trajectory from there.

In retrospect, the greatest achievement Hope ever managed to give himself was realizing that he'd found a place outside of his family where he could say he belonged.  Left to his own devices out on the streets, Leslie Townes would have still been a survivor.  He also would have been stuck as the odd man out.  His natural roguish ways and mannerism would have left with the kind of bad reputation that, if he wasn't careful, might have landed him in all kinds of hot water.  Up on the stage, as Bob Hope, however, his smart mouth was appreciated for the clever wit that emerged from it, often before he even had a chance to think about what he was going to say.  All he had to do was look on a scene of human foibles, and the puns and jabs would start to crowd into his mind waiting for a chance to become the punchline.  It was Hope's ability to channel all that reckless energy into a stage practice that soon became one of the earliest examples of what we now know as stand-up insult comedy.  The best part about it all was that Hope found himself embraced for being a wit.  It was like discovering there was this second home away from home that was out there just waiting for him to arrive.  After cutting his teeth on the Vaudeville stage, that home began to expand for Bob Hope in a lot interesting ways.

Like every single comic on that list above, Hollywood came scouting for talent on the circuit, and Hope got scooped up to Tinseltown, just like Burns, Allen, Benny, and the rest.  This was a somewhat regular occurrence for a brief span of time in Hollywood's early history.  Film moguls like Carl Laemmle and Louis B. Mayer had just begun to set up shop in the Valley of L.A.  Studios like Metro Pictures and Universal began with first buying up land, then building soundstages and home offices, then gathering together all the camera and editing equipment that you could either get your hands on, or else build up from scratch.  Then they would assemble a team of artists, technicians, and writers to operate behind the cameras.  All the Studios needed to complete the picture where stars to perform in front of the lens.  It wasn't a question of being starved for talent, either.  It was more like a bunch of independent entrepreneurs (yes, there was a time when you could have said this about the Big Studios with an absolutely straight face) were able to open a series of privately own megamart stores, and then had to go out and hunt for products to put in the shelf aisles.  The major difference is that storytelling was Hollywood's stock and trade back then.  It meant you needed faces to help make believe come alive.

So, if you were an enterprising studio head like Samuel Goldwyn or Walt Disney, you sent scouts out to look for talent wherever you could find it.  A lot of times, the kind of talent you were looking for could be found on the Vaudeville stage, and one day Bob Hope found himself as Tinseltown's latest discovery.  In many ways, it's fair to say he never looked back.  While his name has faded into a near obscurity by this point, at the time, he was able to enjoy the kind reputation that stars like Bill Murray, Steve Martin, or Eddie Murphy are still able to enjoy today.  This marks the first time one of Bob Hope's movies has ever been reviewed here on The Scriblerus Club.  It comes from somewhere in the middle of Hope's career, after a heyday of covering himself with glory as an entertainer for the troops during World War II.  It's a nice little piece in which he stars alongside a bright young comedian named Lucille Ball.  It's also a film that manages to surprise you with how familiar it's story is if you're an 80s kid.  Made in 1949, and based off the work of Damon Runyon, this is the tale of Sorrowful Jones.

The Story.    

New York, late 1930s.  "This is Walter Winchell speaking to you from Broadway.  The Big Street, in the Big Town.  Take a good look at it.  Just a lot of cold, impersonal buildings.  Hustling, impersonal crowds.  And flashing, impersonal lights.  But watch those lights!  Every time one flashes on or off, someone makes a million dollars...or loses a million dollars...or begs for a dime...or breaks his heart.  Sure, just a big street in a big town, but with a personality, with an impact!  Like a beautiful woman you see once for a few seconds, and then can never forget.  That's the way Damon Runyon felt about this street.  Lindy's Restaurant was his observation tower.  Here he used to meet with his colorful crew of friends.  He made small talk with celebrities, and big talk with busboys.  And he sat drinking coffee, and trading stories far into the night.  And then, when the morning fog would start to roll in across the East River, the city would awaken.  The Sun, and the early risers would start to whip us a fresh batch of daylight.  And as the rest of the town turned out to pound pavements, Damon Runyon turned in to pound his typewriter.  To write about the guys and dolls he met on Broadway.  Like Harry the Horse, Dancing Dan, Apple Annie.  Or, for instance, take the Broadway bookie, who made his living accepting bets on horse races".  This is the story of one such colorful individual.  A small time fry always on the lookout for lady luck, and of how one day the Big City was treated to the sight of a grown man leading a horse by the reins down the streets of Manhattan.  This is the tale of Sorrowful Jones.

A Startling Number of Surprising Similarities.

Stop me if you've heard this before.  You have this small-time hood, and the best way to describe him is with the following list of terms.  "A...Gambler, Pickpocketer, and Low-Life, Bum, Dirty Double Crosser, Greedy Lust for Money...Loan Shark, Tax Fraud...Racketeer, Jaded, Heedless, Wanton Decadence, Vanity, and Conceit, Infidelity".  In short, the guy we're talking about is a complete "scoundrel".  Does any of that sound familiar?  Isn't there something about it that rings a few bells?  In case that doesn't, maybe this will help.  The fellow under discussion here is one of life' natural born small fries.  He's not short by any means, and yet there always clings about him this sense of a very small man, if you take the meaning.  The kind of guy with a head full of dreams about being some kind of Big Shot, and yet all he can ever manage for himself is the role of small time hustler; and that's assuming a generous take on his overall chances.  He's done some time in the dog house at least once before.  He's made a number of mistakes that have cost him the best years of his life.  This happened not once, but twice.  Still, he's the kind of guy who never lets a bad break or two get to him.  If he has anything like a real motto to live by then it might go something like, "You can't keep a good dog down".  So, by hook and crook, he keeps his hand in the racket game, and things are turning around.

At last, after all these years of wheeling, dealing, and scraping, he's had a big break!  He's got some dough coming his way, and with it the prospect of maybe being able to branch out on his own.  Plus there's always the added bonus of showing all those punks he's had to work under or put up with what happens when a smart gambler plays the odds just right and comes out on top.  Let's see all the mongrels who liked to keep their boots on his neck put that in their pipes and smoke it!  There's just one hitch.  While busy making his way back to the top, our erstwhile "hero" finds a real conundrum on his hands.  It's best stated in the form of a simple question.  "Where'd the kid come from"?!  More to the point, what's going to happen to her?  For reasons even Our Boy here can't figure, somehow clawing your way to the top now involves dealing with a little girl all of a sudden.  It's like he just turned around and there she was.  Now this small time racketeer has to keep several plates spinning in the air at once.  He's got to pay off his debts, find some way to make the lucky gamble that will help put him up there in the big leagues of "the business", all while trying to figure what to do with this one little kid who essentially wound up on his doorstep more or less.  She's the one Joker's Wild card in the deck

Any slip up where she's concerned, and the whole elaborate house of cards that our hustler friend has built up for himself could take a tumble, and he'll be worse off than where he started.  So now he's got one more hassle on his hands.  He's got to figure out where this newfound child comes from, and what role, if any, she will have to play in the schemes he's mixed up in.  The worst part of that whole Joker's equation is this.  What's to be done about her, and what will it means if others, like the former "partners" who tried to do him in were ever to get their hands on her.  By now, the outline I've just given you should be familiar enough.  This is, of course, the story of Charlie Barkin Sorrowful Jones, "who fell in love with money at the age of six, and they've been going steady ever since".  "When Sorrowful Jones" goes through a very specific door located in an otherwise legitimate barber's establishment, "he enters another world.  A world of wise money and dumb animals.  Where your bankroll can go faster than any horse in any race.  This is Sorrowful's place of business.  It's called a Horse Room, and if the police knew about it they'd close it.  Because betting on horses is against the law, except at race tracks".  In other words, Sorrowful (Hope) is a crooked race track bookie who scams money off anyone willing enough to play the role of a "dumb animal" and bet away his hard earned paycheck on derbies.

He does it with a friend of his, known only as "Regret" (William Demarest).  While at the same time he tries to pretend he's never been torn over the question of whether or not he should try and re-spark the relationship he had with an old flame named Gladys (Lucille Ball).  Throw a young girl by the name of Martha Jane (Mary Jane Saunders) into the mix, some gangsters after her for the incriminating information she holds, plus one horse called Dreamy Joe, and a lot of hijinks are bound to ensue.  Does any of this sound familiar in some way?  If it does, then join the club.  This turned out to be one of those forgotten movies that sneaks up on you with just how much of a storied history it has behind the scenes.  Mainly that history has to do with the way it connects to what fans are calling Don Bluth's last great film.  If you haven't guessed where all this is going yet, then the truth spelled out amounts to this.  I think I just stumbled on to the inspiration for All Dogs Go to Heaven.  If that sounds like an impossibility, then feel free to take a number and get in line.  I was just as stunned then as you are now when the realization hit me.  However crazy that might sound, everything I've looked into about Bluth's story of the power struggle between anthropomorphic animal gangsters and a little orphan girl who is caught in the middle of it all winds up with a line of descent which leads right back to this film.

Not only do the stories of both pictures share a great deal of similarity, it's even possible to diagam the way the main cast in each flick match up with one another.  To give a for instance, Bob Hope's Sorrowful = Burt Reynolds' Charlie Boy, Bill Demarest's "Regret" = Dom De Luise's  "Itchy", and Bruce Cabot's Big Steve is just a human version of Vic Tayback's Carface Carruthers.  To top it all off, child actor Mary Jane Saunders' character is little more than the live action version original of Judith Barsi's Anne Marie.  The only difference between one version and the next is that Saunders' incarnation doesn't have an ability to talk with animals, and she doesn't need it.  There is also one other, major difference between the two films.  The one addition Bluth makes to his animated retelling of this story is that he chose to include an entire subplot about the afterlife of canines.  It's the one element of All Dogs that has generated the most amount of criticism, commentary, and speculation.  The debate continues to range around whether this is the one narrative choice that helps complete the 80s film, or if it would have been better to leave it out altogether.  I will note that the Hope contains none of these elements, and as a result, the final product might come off as having smoother narrative flow.

At the same time, the backstory I've been able to uncover about the road from Bob Hope to Don Bluth is so fascinating, and the legacy of All Dogs has gone on to outshine any knowledge of its earlier cinematic inspiration, that in order to give Sorrowful Jones its day in the limelight, I'm sort of forced to play the game of Apples and Oranges in order to give the reader a clear idea of the picture should they ever choose to watch it.  That means I'm going to have to talk about not just the 1949 Hope film, or even the looming shadow of Bluth's more famous retelling, but also of how both features emerged out of a very specific literary context.  Perhaps one of the most amazing things to discover in researching this one seemingly obscure bit of Golden Age cinema was to find out that the character portrayed by both Leslie Townes and Burt Reynolds originally had his start in a work of written short fiction.

The Writer and the Original Short Story.  

If not many are familiar with the work of Bob Hope anymore, then it's pretty much a guarantee that no one remembers a New York short story author by the name of Damon Runyon.  The best source of information I've been able to discover about him comes from an overview of the writer and his work as provided by Pete Hamill's introduction to the Penguin Classics collection of Runyon's short works.  Looking into the background of this overlooked individual allows a better understanding of why someone like Leslie "Bob" Hope would be drawn to star in a vehicle based off one of Runyon's publications.  It's just possible to make the argument that both of them were alike in many ways.  Each of them qualified as one of life's natural born misfits.  According to Hamill, "He started life as Alfred Damon Runyan (with an “a”). The date of birth was October 4, 1880, a year before Doc Holiday and the Earps fought in the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, while Henry James, in a very different America, published The Portrait of a Lady. His father, Alfred Lee Runyan, was a second-generation newspaperman, an itinerant who could set type and write stories and who settled for a long while in Pueblo, Colorado. There the boy was raised and began to learn his trade. The boy’s mother died when he was either seven or eleven (the biographical confusion came from Runyon himself, who at the height of his fame shaved four years off his age for an entry in Who’s Who in America).

"The best bet is eleven. His widowed father was part of the hard-drinking newspaper tradition, while Damon roamed Pueblo with his schoolmates. He went only as far as the sixth grade but would get his most valuable education (about craft and life) from working at newspapers, following the unwritten syllabus of a classical apprenticeship. At fifteen he was being paid to write for the Pueblo Evening Press. In one of his early bylined stories, a typo changed the “a” to an “o,” and the young man let it stand, perhaps as a small declaration of independence from his father (vii-viii)".  Hamill never bothers to elaborate this point, but it's easy enough to tell that the kid was born into something of an unlucky hand.  I don't just mean his mother's early death, either.  I'm talking about the fact he had the wrong luck to be born into the kind of borderline household where the way the parents treat their kid is just far enough over the line to qualify as abusive, while at the same time maybe never enough to get the cops called on the caretakers.  As things stood, Runyon lived in a world that never even knew Social Services could ever be a thing, and so the he was left to fend for himself from a very early age.

The one decent thing Al Runyan seems to have to have done for his son was to offer him the avenue necessary to make a living through journalism.  It may have been cold comfort for change.  It was also a lifeline, of sorts.  So when both parents shuffled off whatever kind of coil this is and left their only child destitute, young Damon took the bull by the horns.  To his own surprise, he learned how to tame it to his advantage.  For whatever reason, the city of New York came off sounding like a golden place to live.  He must have believed it, because sooner or later the cub reporter was able to make his way there in 1910.  It was there the cub turned into a veteran ink stained wretch, pounding out words on a typewriter for a  lousy $500 an hour, working for one of the papers owned by Old Man Hearst.  "By all accounts, he was a small, quiet man, given to expensive clothes and good food, with a fine eye for detail and an ear for the nuances of human speech. As a newspaperman, in that era before television, he could put the reader in the courtroom or the ballpark or the scene of a murder. His silence was not surly. He was listening. Reporters learn quickly that if they are doing the talking, they can’t hear a word from anyone else. The same accounts tell us that Runyon, in the years of his growing fame, was a dreadful husband. (His wife would die in 1931 from the effects of alcoholism while Runyon lived in solitude at the Hotel Forrest.) He was, like many of his characters, a heavy gambler, always in need of money".

(ix-x).  It was during his time in NYC that Runyon was able to carve out a place for himself in whatever speck of pop culture dirt he has left to his name.  The way he did it was the same as how all good reporters get their stories: watch, listen, and ask questions.  These are the basics any journalist worth their salt should know about.  Only there's a bit of a trick involved with that last maxim.  It's hard and fast, while also being a bit slippery if you're dealing with the kind of subject matter that made Runyon famous (albeit for a time).  Yet it didn't take Damon long to discover that, much like Martin Scorsese years later, he had a knack for covering the seedy belly of New York's criminal underworld.  This meant a lot of his paycheck (and not just his fame) was made in writing about all the gangsters, mob bosses, and small time hoods he knew that frequented the streets of Broadway.  From what I can tell, it was a paying gig that Runyon must have stumbled into almost by pure accident.  He wasn't in the Apple long before Lindy's Restaurant sort of became his de facto base of operations.  It was his office space outside of the the press room, along with functioning as something in the way of a second home.  Lindy's must have been quite the place to hang out back in the day, because that's where Runyon pre-empted the actions of Henry Hill from Goodfellas, and made the acquaintance of New York's criminal elite.

Lindy's was an informal Grand Central Station for a lot of the top mob bosses and their various underlings and hangers on in the Roaring 20s during Prohibition.  Guys like Lucky Luciano, Jack "Legs" Diamond, and "Dutch" Schultz would often be in need of a stopover place in which to either conduct impromptu "business" or else just get a spot where they could forget about their lives for a while (or at least that's what they all "tried").  So, there was Lindy's, in they would go, and there would be Runyon seated in his usual sentry post at the bar, waiting for any likely story to head his way.  And wouldn't you know it.  Who should come into the joint right as he's short on cash but ol' Nathan Detroit.  Maybe he's a got a story worth telling.  Either way, it's a chance to pick up some spare change.

"The first of Runyon’s Broadway stories appeared in Hearst’s Cosmopolitan two months before the Wall Street crash and was called “Romance in the Roaring Forties.” It was about a rough customer called Dave the Dude, his doll, Miss Billy Perry, and a gossip columnist called Waldo Winchester. Like most of the Broadway stories, it’s about love and money. Dave the Dude was probably based on real-life gangster Frank Costello (who by mob standards was a pacifist, preferring brains to muscle). The gossip columnist was an obvious version of Walter Winchell, who would soon be the most powerful journalist in America and much later, in the last years of Runyon’s life, a close friend. That first Broadway story was something new in American fiction, with its own rhythms and language and a view of human beings that was at once cynical and embracing.   The audience must have loved it, and certainly magazine editors did, in that era when the short story was a major form of American fiction. More than eighty stories would follow, featuring Nathan Detroit, Feet Samuels, Sky Masterson, Big Jule, Nicely-Nicely Jones, Madame La Gimp, Good Time Charley Bernstein, Miss Missouri Martin (based on Texas Guinan), Benny South Street, and scores of others. Many would later appear in the Frank Loesser musical Guys and Dolls, which opened on Broadway in 1950. Runyon wouldn’t live to see this wonderful show, but I suspect he would have loved it. The lyrics, music, and spoken word were absolutely true to Runyon’s stories and his vision of Broadway (x)".

"This is, of course, a fictional world. The gangsters don’t speak the way real gangsters spoke in that era, or in ours. There is no obscenity, for example, no compounding of vile words to express contempt. And in the tales of romance there are subtle implications of sexual activity but no clinical details and no eroticism. Runyon is often accused of sentimentalizing his gangsters, and is sometimes guilty as charged. But a close reading of most of these stories shows us a clear darker side. His people often do terrible things to each other, and out of base motives.  He actually knew many of the people he describes in his fictions. One such character he called Nathan Detroit in some stories and in others, Armand Rosenthal, The Brain. The character was loosely based on the notorious gambler Arnold Rothstein, who was said to have fixed the 1919 World Series. In his 1925 masterwork, The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald presented a minor character named Meyer Wolfsheim, also based on Rothstein, but alas, he is a clumsy...caricature. Runyon’s version was free of this virus, for good reason. He knew Rothstein well and often sat with him for coffee at the Rothstein table near the cashier at Lindy’s restaurant on Broadway (as Mindy’s, the location of many of his stories).

Rothstein was no common thug. He was, by most accounts, articulate, subtle, intelligent. Presumably their conversations were about gambling, women, and food, and not the meaning of life, but Runyon never told us. On November 4, 1928, Runyon had one final whispery conversation with Rothstein at Lindy’s before the gambler went off to be shot dead at the Park Central Hotel for welshing on a gigantic gambling debt. He lives on in Runyon’s stories (xi-xii)".  My concern with the Tale of Sorrowful Jones and the Little Doll is it's claim to fit into the same mold of a roman a clef that really happened, and all the real life characters are just dressed up in pseudonyms.  All I can do is to hope that's not the case, and that Runyon was giving to embellishing stories whole cloth to the same extent that he was at telling the facts as a reporter.  With any luck there might be just enough room for doubt about the details of the story I'm about to relate.  The original source material for Don Bluth's celestial animal fable is set not in New Orleans, but instead it's the New York of Runyon's day.  The plot is also similar yet different.  The original, literary incarnation of Charlie is this small-time bookie who makes a living scamming off of regular race track betters.  One of his marks puts up his own daughter as collateral, and when he can't pay up, he "takes a powder" leaving his surviving little girl in the hands of this crooked shyster.

Much like in the movie, the pseudonymous "Mr. Jones" wants nothing to do with his new young charge at first.  He sees her mainly as this pest that's turned up on his doorstep, and can't see why he should be bothered with her at all.  Of course, Little Miss Marker as he thinks of her (named after the title given to illegal betting slips) is still just a child, which means she needs someone to look after her.  With nowhere else to turn, the job falls to Sorrowful-Barkin.  What's funny about a setup like this is that at this point most of the audience can begin to guess what's going to happen next.  We've got an Odd Couple plot on our hands.  You've got these two mismatched characters who find themselves unwillingly thrown together due to circumstances.  It's difficult to say just how old this trope is, yet one gets the sense that it's got enough of a heritage to it so that when we encounter it here, it feels like something we've seen or read about before, even if we decide to leave Bluth's efforts out of the equation.  If people know what to expect from a setup of like this, it's because we have films like Bringing Up Baby and His Gal Friday, comedy duos like Laurel and Hardy, even a novel like Pride and Prejudice that rely on the idea of incompatible pairings whose sparring is the source of drama.

Like I say, this is something the audience already knows from a variety of elsewheres.  Having that kind of knowledge in mind is what gears us up to expect a lot of the shenanigans that are familiar in stories like this.  And, to no surprise, it's exactly what Runyon provides for us.  The two start out as not really liking each other all that much.  There's a cooling off period where they start to bond, and by the end everybody's friends for life.  Such a plot is about as stock as they come, and it's the fact that the narrative adheres so well to the tradition of which its a part that gives me an odd hope that this means it really is a work of fiction spun from whole cloth.  The reason for that comes from what happens in the denouement.  Here's as good a time as any to slap a big old Trigger Warning label on what I'm about to say next.  Any and all 80s kids who don't want their precious childhood memories ruined can skip ahead to the next section of this review.  For those who are brave enough to tough it out, here goes.  It turns out the ending for the short story is far more brutal than anything Bluth decided to throw at us as kids.

The original version of Anne Marie never makes it to the end.  Just like in the animated movie, she contracts pneumonia, and needs a doctor to get well.  For whatever reason, Runyon allows Little Miss Marker, the title character of his story, succumb to her illness, and the original Charlie is left to just slink off into the night, empty handed, with no one to be there for him, and it's an open question whether his time with Annie has even made all that much of a difference in his life.  The last we see of Mr. Jones is him consulting his account book for all of his marks, indicating that all he's going to do from there is pick up right where he left off.  It's almost as if nothing at all has happened.  Are you starting to see why I've got my hopes that this is all just one big, botched fairy tale from start to finish?  We've been told that Runyon based his stories off of people he's met, and what has actually happened to them.  However, everything about "Little Miss Marker" sticks so close to the tropes of the Odd Couple plot that it's difficult to believe we're dealing with actual history.  This is compounded by the fact that the main character doesn't seem to change all that much by his time with the little girl.  I'm not seeing a character undergo a transformation.  It's more like watching a chess piece get moved on the board.

It's little details like this which convince me that this time, Runyon is selling a phony race track ticket.  The one element in the narrative that might give me pause is the inclusion of the figure known simply as "Regret".  According to Wikipedia (apply salt as needed) this was not a make-believe character, but a real person.  Runyon's "best friend was mobster accountant Otto Berman, and he incorporated Berman into several of his stories under the alias "Regret, the horse player". When Berman was killed in a hit on Berman's boss, Dutch Schultz, Runyon quickly assumed the role of damage control for his deceased friend, mostly by correcting erroneous press releases, including one that stated Berman was one of Schultz's gunmen, to which Runyon replied, "Otto would have been as effective a bodyguard as a two-year-old (web)".  Here's where the trick of the tale comes in.  This same "Regret" features in "Little Miss Marker" as the close friend of Sorrowful Jones.  Now if you've been paying attention, you'll recall how Sorrowful is not just the inspiration, but the first incarnation of the character who would become Charlie, the protagonist of Bluth's film.  Now Runyon tells us "Regret" was his best friend.  Is the math starting to add up here?  It means that this guy is meant to be the Dom De Luise of the short story.

According to a traced line of literary descent, kind, loyal, and above all, lovable "Itchy" Itchiford is supposed to be based off of a real life cold blooded, early 20th century Mafioso lieutenant.  The only bit of trivia left that could boggle the mind even further is to learn that the actual gangster's death was more or less accurate to how Francis Ford Coppola depicted it in his dramatization of the Fall of "Dutch" Schultz from his 87 movie, The Cotton Club.  Seriously, watch this scene, and then try and superimpose either Itch, or just De Luise himself and let your mind reel as it all plays out.  It's not helped by the fact that one of Schultz's bodyguards in that scene looks like the kind of live action role Dom would have be perfect for.  At the same time, it is the obvious implied layers of remove between history and the short story which makes me just a little more confident that Runyon is pulling our leg.  Coppola is doing the same thing in the sequence linked above, and yet he's also doing the best he can to stick to historical facts, and in that regard, he succeeds better than Runyon.  As a line from his most famous flick has it, guys like Otto Berman and Dutch Schultz "coulda been anybody.  You coulda been Mayor" Schultz, "or a Senator" Berman.  Instead, they ended up living and eventually dying as cold blooded killers.

Take my word for it, guys like that are never really Family Men.  Not in a way that counts, never in the truest sense of the word.  If you need another real life example to demonstrate what I mean, go watch Scorsese's The Irishmen to see how someone like Berman more or less throws away the chance for a normal family, and then find it's difficult to tell what difference it makes.  Those are the real people Runyon was dealing with.  It also explains why he would give underworld mooks like Berman and Rothstein aliases like "Regret" and "Detroit".  It even accounts for why he would take these real life public enemies and craft them all into these quasi-romantic figures living in a fairy tale version of Manhattan that even Bluth couldn't bring himself to sugar coat.  What does it tell you when a kid's cartoon winds up being more historically accurate then the reports from a journalist who was there and saw it all first hand?  Again, however, the upside to all this remains the same.  The whole thing is fiction.  Runyon probably conjured Jones-Barkin out of thin air.  There most likely never was any real life Anne Marie.  All we've got is just one lonely old street huckster spinning his tales of Fantasy for a ravenous public, just for the sake of being able to keep afloat in the rotten days of the Big Apple.

Now, with all of this in mind, there's still one important question that hasn't been answered.  How does "Little Miss Marker" work as fiction.  How good of a story is it?  Well, if I'm being honest, my biggest takeaway is that I just read something that's thin in the ground.  I brought up the subject of characters as chess pieces, and that's really the tale's biggest flaw.  A basic outline of this story sounds like it could been entertaining on paper.  All that's required to pull it off is, not the perfect execution by any means.  There's never going to be anything like the greatest work of fiction ever, nor is it all that necessary to give a good entertainment.  All Runyon had to do here was to find the best way to execute any and all plot beats that would work to the narrative's advantage and enhance the audience's enjoyment of it.  A key way to do this would have been to focus in on the characters, as this is the kind of fiction where all of its drama and interest is generated from the way in which the two main leads bounce off of one another.  Or at least there is one possible way of making it work.  I say this because when it comes to looking at the Hope version in more detail, we find another example of playing the cards in a good way.

Hope and Bluth: Comparing and Contrasting.  

Before we get to the main event of this article, there's still one last bit of production history for this story that needs to be dealt with.  If it makes sense to talk of All Dogs Go to Heaven as an animated adaptation of a forgotten Damon Runyon story, then it's also not the first.  That honor goes to a film called Little Miss Marker.  It was made and released in the year 1934.  It also just happened to be the movie that put Shirley Temple's name on the map.  From what I can tell, the reputation of that film among 1930s audiences is what turned her into America's Sweetheart.  Hence her still remembered pop culture status.  As for the first adaptation in and of itself, it follows the short story for the most part.  It's the kind of flick where everything starts out fine, and then sort of grinds to a screeching halt as the filmmakers drop the ball in the final act.  Even before then, however, there were tell-tale signs that the package wasn't all that well made.  No one except Temple stands tall enough to leave any major impression, yet the trouble there is that she's not really the main character.  That role is given to an actor named Adolph Menjou.  He's probably a lot more talented than what this film gives him to work with, and yet this time he doesn't have much play off on.  He comes off more like a James Thurber character, rather than a hard bitten, yet charming rogue.  What's happened with this version is very simple.  

The film starts to fall into a rut that would often become the staple of your typical Temple picture.  The simplest way to sum it all up is that Shirley would never really be given much of anything to do.  All that would be required of her was to walk in front of the camera and look cute.  That was it was for the most part.  Maybe someone would throw in a flock of seagulls every now and then, however, most of the Temple vehicles never broke out of the mold established by Little Miss Marker.  It got to the point where even if the final product was a financial success, it didn't change the fact that having Shirley cast in a film meant that she was automatically condemned to being almost like this living department store doll.  It's unhealthy, to say the least, and the actress herself even grew to loath it.  Looking back on her career, she admitted that the one director who ever gave her anything of substance to do was John Ford.  He realized her true potential as an actress in films like Wee Willie Winkie, which despite its title turned out to be a well made adventure yarn.  The second time Ford and Temple worked together was in a criminally underappreciated Western with John Wayne and Henry Fonda, called Fort Apache

It was always Temple's fondest wish that she could go on making films like that.  She would have liked to be a child action star, in other words.  To put it another way, if the script for a film like The Goonies had been written in, say, 1939 or 1942, she would have lobbied to be cast in Sean Astin's role.  To be fair to her, it's obvious there was a lot of untapped dramatic potential in her, even as a child.  So it would have been nice to see Shirley take on a Pre-Code version of the Fratelli Gang.  At the same time, I'm just wondering how audiences would react to the sight of, say, Mickey Rooney being threatened in one particular scene and going, I want to play the violin!  Anyway, what could have been aside, a film like Little Miss Marker turned out to be the making of a cinematic straightjacket for Shirley.  It took a long time for her to break away from all of that.  As for the rest of the production, the film adds at least one new wrinkle to the mix.  We're given our first version of Carface, a character who didn't exist in the original short story.  He's called Big Steve in this film, and he sort of amounts to nothing in the end.

When the film reaches the part where Temple's version of Anne Marie gets sick, rather than added tension and suspense to the action by holding her for ransom, or something like that, he's instead overcome by that incurable Temple cuteness, and instead winds up donating some much needed blood to help make her well again, and they all lived happily ever after.  The End.  Now, here's what's wrong with that setup.  It's not the happy ending as such, that's expected.  The problem is that it rings hollow if the odds against it aren't more impactful and meaningful.  It'd be like a version of Lord of the Rings where Sauron just gives up and surrenders because of the sudden onset of a guilty conscience.  It might be for the best, yet it's also not a real story.  There's no dramatic tension, and nothing for the audience to grab onto and keep them on the edge of their seat.  It's just the dullest sort of anti-climax.  I think Temple was closest to the mark when she pointed out that endings like the one she had to endure in Miss Marker don't work just because they were saccharine.  It was also because even she could sense the kind of callous insincerity behind such creative choices.  The filmmakers weren't interested in lifting the spirits of the audience, they were just toying with their emotions with an eye on the money.  It should be noted that even at his lowest moments, Don Bluth never stooped that low in his career.

It was box office revenue, and not the desire to tell any meaningful story that powered the engine of a flick like Little Miss Marker.  It was this manipulative and hollow core of the picture that made even Temple turn against it in her later years.  Which, at last, brings us to it's first remake in 1949.  Right off the bat, we're in a much more sure and accomplished territory with Sorrowful Jones.  Everything from the lighting, the cinematography, and the casting works better here than in the Temple film.  More important than any of this is the caliber of the script.  Perhaps it will help to give an idea of the overall quality of the Bob Hope adaptation if we compare and contrast it with the Bluth version.  Here's the part where I may be guilty of blasphemy in some respects, so consider this a different kind of fair warning for what's in store.  While I'll be talking about a film from 1949, what I'll have to say about is going to wind up becoming part of an ongoing debate about the overall status of All Dogs Go to Heaven within the circles of Bluth fandom.  I was surprised it turned out like this, yet then again, I wasn't expecting an old black and white film to tell me so much about a later staple of 80s childhood cinema.  It's not the sort of result that I deliberately set out looking for.  It's all just a simple matter of what happened.

So, like I said, the first thing that jumps out at you with a film like Sorrowful Jones is the overall improvement in the quality of the production.  From a technical standpoint, we're looking at the product of a Hollywood Dream Machine that's had plenty of time in which to hone and perfect its craft.  This time the filmmakers show us that they know what kind of story they're telling.  What we've got on our hands now is a heady mixture of two staples of cinema's Golden Age: the Film Noir Gangster picture and the Screwball Comedy.  It's a potent mix that can offer some very good results when done right.  On the whole, I'd have to say that director Sidney Lanfield did a pretty decent job for himself here.  Much like the story he's working with, the director appears to be a veteran with a healthy familiarity with the contrasting style of the Comedy and the Thriller, and of how to meld them together into a seamless package.  The world Lanfield is able to conjure up for the camera is almost a perfect expression of the sort of classic postwar 1940s New York.  It's a place where the cast can easily get lost wandering in and among the monoliths of grey concrete and steel that dwarf their every waking moment, and pens them in like animals in an intricate cage.  This is a desperate city full of desperate lives in search of a way out.  This is the classic Noir setup that Hope walks into, and he makes it his own in mere seconds.

Along with him comes the second ingredient of the story, the madcap charm of the Screwball Comedy.  Hope was an old pro at the genre by this point in his career, and he handles the comedic bits with an easy grace that deserves a closer examination as we go on.  For now, it's enough to note that his performance turns out to be the key to melding the two tones of the movie together.  Now to be fair, he doesn't present us with the only way to do this type of picture justice.  Blending together Noir and Comedy can be done well in other ways than the one Lanfield gives us.  It's just that the addition of Hope as the main lead turns out to be a key piece of the puzzle that helps make the picture stand out in such a clear way that once the credits roll, it kind of becomes difficult to believe it would have worked as well without him.  Let that stand as the first indication of his skills as an actor here.  Hope's doesn't have to carry the picture on his shoulder's alone, though.  He's also got the star of I Love Lucy there to work alongside him.  Lucille Ball hadn't yet made her breakout roll as the reigning monarch of the TV Sitcom at this point, yet her star was rising, and the best was still yet to come.  So this film gives us a good snapshot of her career before it really began to take off in a big way.  There's a sense in which she's playing against type here, and once again, it gives us a great idea of her talents as an actress.

She's playing the role of Gladys, a one time flame of Hope's protagonist before the curtain opens.  Their both somewhat estranged now when the action starts, yet even in their first interactions, much like in an episode of Friends of Cheers, you can tell there's still a lot of the old spark left between them.  What's surprising in a good way about Lucy's performance here is that she plays the role like a classic Noir girl, though she knows how to give this character just the right light touch.  She's found herself having to pal around with gangsters and criminals, and even hints that she's done some time of her own.  However she hasn't let any of that beat her down, and is very much ready to run away from the circus and join real life.  She's open to the idea of Sorrowful joining her in making an escape, yet she's also aware of how deep he's in with the sharks, and so she makes the smart choice of keeping other options open.  In terms of the wider meaning of her character, Glady's is somewhat interesting in terms of her composition history.  Like the Carface figure, she's a new edition to the Runyon fable, and made her first appearance in the Temple adaptation, along with Big Steve.  There she was called "Bangles".  Besides having an awkward title, she was given a lot less to do than she does here in the 40s.

In the 49 adaptation, she's positioned as an equal, someone who can stand toe to toe with Sorrowful and come out on top of any arguments they get into more often than not.  Casting Lucy and Bob in these roles is a further clue to who each character is meant to be.  With the proper writing in place, Sorrowful and Gladys are revealed to be the classic quarreling couple that used to be a staple of Screwball Comedies, and here we see this same trope allowed yet another bow before the camera.  To give an idea of the onscreen dynamic generated by this trope, we catch a distant echo of it in the interactions between Bill Murray and Sigourney Weaver in Ghostbuster I and II.  There we're presented with an example of the Screwball Couple after the field of Comedy has made a transition into the more SNL-Brat Pack oriented style of humor that has come to define the genre up to today.  And yet it's still possible to find the DNA laid out by Hope and Ball in the way Weaver and Murray bounce off of each other.  It's the case of a normal, everyday woman trying to figure out this total goofball of a man in order to see if there's anything serious there worth committing to, or if she should just move on.  That's the kind of dynamic going on between Lucy and Bob in Lanfield's version of the Runyon story.

The other interesting thing to talk about with Lucy's character is also where the first comparison to be made with Bluth's creations comes in.  The perfect irony is that if she has her canine analogue in the All Dogs franchise, then I'm not real sure how important she is, at least in terms of the first film.  If I'm being honest (and say sorry if that's what I have to do here), a much better counterpart for Lucy's role would have to be Sheena Easton's character in the San Francisco sequel in 1996.  If this sounds bad to you, then it probably doesn't help things that both of them are formatted as these Noir lounge singer types.  They each match as a pair of working girls trying to survive their way through a cutthroat underworld until they meet Sorrowful Charlie.  I know neither what to say or do with this information.  I merely place it out there for the sake of full disclosure.  If nothing else, it means there is a greater connection (however ironic) between Hope's film and one of the more controversial sequels to a Don Bluth picture.  Nor is that where the conversation on the contrasts of the similar films ends.  A comparison between the way Bob Hope and Burt Reynolds portray the lead character in each adaptation can go a long way toward giving hints about which film has the better strengths and weaknesses.

For me, it all comes down to how Runyon's main protagonist is portrayed not just in terms of how they are acted, but also how they a written.  There's plenty to say about Reynold's and Hope's skills as fellow thespians.  However, in the end, none of this can matter so long as the performers are never given a good script to work with.  All good stories are written before they are ever performed.  It's a maxim that holds true where either the Jones or Dogs film are concerned.  Let's take the similarities shared by the main lead as a good place to start.  Each of them qualifies as a riff on the classic Noir anti-hero.  They are both small time hoodlums who find themselves well entrenched within the world of organized crime.  This matching correspondence of characterization extends all the way to how the leads conducts his own "business".  It involves the illegal raking off of a percentage of the profits from gambling patrons.  Here is where a slight difference in operations exists between Sorrowful and Charlie.  Runyon's original creation limits his activities to being a bookie for horse races.  Mr. B. Barkin, meanwhile, tends to utilize that particular racket as a side "job".  The viewer gets the impression that Bluth's version of Jones is situated somewhat higher up the criminal chain of command, if there is any to be had.  He was the former business partner of the villain, and this high spot on the totem pole is what drives a lot of Charlie's actions.  He even becomes an independent operator for a brief span.

This is an example of the way in which Bluth likes to take his source material and give it a slightly larger than life quality.  Such ambitions are beyond the reach of the Sorrowful from either the Runyon or Lanfield productions.  He's a small-timer who knows that pretty much all the odds are stacked against him ever being able to achieve that kind of personal glory.  For one thing, the 40s version of Charlie is given just enough hints and clues to be able to construct a working background to his character.  It turns out his 1940s equivalent has been sent up the river one or two times before the curtain opens.  In Bluth's film, we see him making a break from the slammer (i.e. the dog pound), and yet it's treated as the first time he's ever faced some sort of punishment for his crimes.  That's not the case for him in 49.  It's implied that he's done multiple times in the pen.  He's such a regular visitor that the he has a whole rap sheet and is well known (and sometimes even liked) by the local NYPD.  The buried subtext of all this is that the mob will frequently use Sorrowful as the nearest convenient fall guy for whenever "the business" is getting too hot, and the metro boys come sniffing around.  Whenever that happens, no problem!  All you gotta do is push Sorrowful into spotlight and the heat is off.  The coppers think they've got enough of a collar, then "business" resumes like normal clockwork.

This is interesting backstory material to piece together for Hope's portrayal of the character.  Imagine a version of Charlie whose had to suffer being put through this same wringer, time and again.  The subtext indication for this setup is that he's essentially been ordered "up river" by Carface/Big Steve, that the constant refrain of almost ritual or routine humiliation has sapped him of whatever fighting spirit he might have had at some point when he was just starting out in the "trade".  This "Charlie" has had all the fuck you removed over time with well manipulated surgical care.  When we first see him at curtain rise, he still has something of a spine left, yet there's also a lot of jelly in it's makeup.  Hope's character is not the kind of guy dumb enough to make trouble for himself.  In fact, he spends a great deal trying to avoid it.  It really is a complete 180 from Reynolds' incarnation.  The minute his "Sorrowful" realizes that he's been the victim of a double cross (and worse) by his erstwhile partner, he rushes headlong into a grand scheme to get revenge, and it almost proves to be his undoing.  

It's this running dichotomy between the two interpretations that's responsible for a lot of the fascination that comes from looking at these two remakes side by each other.  Both Runyon and Lanfield portray the lead as a world-weary old pro, where Bluth seems to handle him as this near-novice.  Someone whose just barely become what's known as a "Made Man".  You get the sense that the dog rendition of Sorrowful is this guy who's big break has come sometime very recently before the story proper starts.  He may have been Carface's partner, yet there is a sense in which that whole arrangement might have been a setup in and of itself.  That, much like the way Big Steve treats Jones, Carruthers might have simply flattered Charlie with the opportunity is playing with the big boys for the sole purpose of making him a fall guy at some point, for some undisclosed reasons.  The logic of this surmise makes sense.  The one hitch in this thinking is that Bluth's interpretation doesn't seem to provide us with as much background information to any of the characters to the extent that Lanfield's script does.

The best example of this stems from the original Anne Marie of the 49 film.  Fans of the animated version will be surprised to learn that she was originally just this average, ordinary slum girl from the poorer neighborhoods of the Apple.  It doesn't stop with just learning where she comes from.  We also get to meet her parents, or one of them anyway.  The first time we see her Dad, he's this schlub who's even more down on his luck than either Charlie or Sorrowful.  He needs money desperately, and so when he can't come up with $20 dollars on the barrel head, he puts his own daughter up for collateral until he can scrounge up the dough.  He does this right to Sorrowful's own face.  This portrayal of Charlie never says much, yet it's clear that just a few minutes with Anne Marie's old man is enough to make him wish the pathetic bastard would crawl under a rock somewhere and get run over by a freight truck.  That turns out to be very close to what happens to this loser.  He goes to get the 20 dollars someone had promised him, and it turns out to be none other than Big Steve.  In the process, the father also learns that the horse race he's staked his only child on is so rigged it might as well belong to Rube Goldberg.  He tries to make a run for it, of course.  Then he winds up floating in the Hudson with Sorrowful's racing ticket in his pocket.  This version of Carface kills Anne Marie's own father.

We never find out how the two of them met up in Bluth's account.  Nothing is there to tell us about where she comes from, how Carface found out about her, nor how or where she gets her powers.  We don't even get a clue as to what her strange capabilities amount to.  Lanfield's iteration, meanwhile, winds up very much the pawn in a larger game.  Here's where yet another element of Hope's picture gets a remake from Bluth.  I think most of us remember the whole racetrack sequence, and the racer steed who is fixed to win because its his birthday?  It's really no more than a sideline stop in the Reynolds flick.  It's made the entire focal point of Hope's movie.  The scheme is for Big Steve to have a steroid pill administered to Cawhee, or Dreamy Joe, as he was originally called, that will allow him to win the race.  It will also kill him not long after.  To top it all off, Big Steve arranges for the horse to be run under the name of the 49 film's Anne Marie.  The human form of Vic Tayback's character is making a little girl an accessory to murder, and now Charlie, Sasha, and "Itchy" all have to defend her life.

Conclusion: Bob Hope's All Dogs Go to Heaven.

In a lot of ways, writing this review has been one surprise after another.  I came in thinking all I had to do was make a simple write-up of an old black and white movie, and maybe sprinkle in a few tidbits about how it ties in to the cinema of Don Bluth.  Just a nice little side treat for all the 80s kid readers out there.  Instead, I made one important mistake.  I did what every critic worth the name is supposed to do.  I got curious about where the story came from, let that get the better of me, and began to dig to see what I could find.  The net result was an undisclosed trove of information about one, single story, and all the permutations its been through as it's been handled by different hands throughout the 20th century.  I don't think the manuscript drafts for Lord of the Rings ever went through that much turn over, and that's a way more involved text than a forgotten short story by a guy with a fitting Noir name like Damon Runyon.  What it all amounts to in practice is that instead of just giving my two cents about one single film, I now have to decide which of the three versions comes off as the Best in Show.  Believe me when I say this was not how I expected this article to end up, and so here I am having to make a more complex judgment call anyway.  It seems to come down to a choice between Hope and Bluth.  Which means anything I say next can and will be used against by my own age bracket.  So no pressure.

I will have to preface what I'm about to say next (and there goes half the audience, by the way) that a debate has been raging on in fan circles about how well All Dogs holds up as a film.  For the longest while I thought this was a settled matter.  It was one of those films I caught a glimpse of maybe once when I was a kid, and then all I had to work on was snippets of slowly fading memories.  Sooner or later I realized I'd have to go back and not just rewatch it for this article, but also do the same for Hope's version if I ever wanted to make sure I was giving an honest judgment call.  Well, I did my homework, and what I've seen leads me to just one conclusion.  Don Bluth has made a cult classic.  I hope that doesn't disappoint anyone.  What I saw wasn't up to par with films like The Land Before Time, and for my money, it will never be able to hold a candle to the likes of An American Tail.  At the same time, it's impossible to just discard, or throw away.  Now, does this mean I think the movie is perfect?  Well, here's where the comparisons with the Hope film have to be made.  I've said just now that all actors can only be as good as their characters are written.  That it is the text that determines the quality of the movie image.  A bit of discussion about Bluth's script can shed a lot of light on its strengths and faults.

The key things for me about the animated version of Runyon's Noir fairy tale is that it's success hinges on two factors.  The first is that Bluth has wound up telling his audience two stories, instead of just one.  The second is that he seems to have been in a bit of a quandary as to how far he should have gone with the main character.  To get the first point out of the way, it's possible spot the DNA of Runyon's fable as the overarching skeleton of Bluth's film.  Charlie really is just an anthropomorphized canine version of Sorrowful Jones.  It means the basic plot of the story is little more than a rehash of Hope's film.  This in and of itself is not the problem.  Sometimes remakes have gone on to rightly eclipse the original.  What complicates matters is the way Bluth decides to handle the Afterlife aspect as his film.  I was originally going to say that this was an add-on that the filmmaker had decided to put into the original story.  What stopped me from doing this was going back to the Hope version, and seeing the following exchange take place between Sorrowful and the 49 version of little Anne Marie.

I hope at least somebody watched that clip.  It's clinching proof that, whatever anyone wants to think about the introduction of Heaven and hell into the proceedings, Bluth never, in the strictest sense, invented it.  It was already a component in his inspiration.  It also tells me that Hope's film is perhaps the primary source material that Bluth used in constructing his own version.  That sort of knowledge forces us to keep Hope in mind as we unpack the two defining features of the Reynolds vehicle.  To start with, Lanfield gives the subject just that one shown above.  It's usage in the film is straight and to the point.  It's meant to convey that the main lead has started to grow a conscience, and is perhaps even surprised that Anne Marie (or Mary Jane) is beginning to grow on him to the point where's he's undergoing a change of character.  In storytelling terms, while the scene might not win any awards, it's quick, witty, economical, and efficient at getting all its main points across.  It might even work as a good sample to show in screenwriting workshops as a demonstration of how to streamline a plot.  Bluth, meanwhile, takes all of that, and turns it into a major plot point for the entirety of his film.

Now, to be fair, it is just possible that something like this could work, even as a movie.  The idea of a lost soul having to traverse its way as a kind of  shadow between the world of the living and the hereafter in search of some sort of personal redemption might carry enough of a fascination to the point where it's possible to see if you can spin a decent enough narrative out of it.  Come to think of it, isn't that the basic plot of Patrick Swayze's Ghost (1990)?  So on it's own, the idea might be all well and good.  The issue with it's place in All Dogs, however, is it places the director in something of an avoidable conundrum.  Since he's committed himself to a remake of Sorrowful Jones, and yet his Imagination is on fire with all these Dante-esque ideas, Bluth is has got himself stuck trying to see if he can weld his more out-there celestial conceptions to the simple idea of a gangster looking out for a little girl.  The question then becomes whether or not it's possible to weld these two concepts together in a such a way that does both of them justice.  Here's the part where things get tricky.  I know Bluth was sold on putting the two into the same film.  I'm just not sure he blended them well in the final result.

We're seeing the director trying to pack a lot of material for the audience to take in, and some of it amounts to some fairly heady or high concept stuff for a kid's film.  I'm not saying don't try this at home.  What I am aiming at is the idea that if you want to tackle something like death or the Afterlife in a family venue, then you kind of need more time to flesh out these ideas to the point where you're not talking down to anyone, even yourself.  Perhaps a better way to have played things would be to have it as like a kid's animated feature version of like a Twilight Zone episode.  Maybe have it start with the assassination car going into the river and then have Charlie struggling out onto the dock.  After that, we'd learn a truncated and incomplete version of what happened, so that it looks like we've just seen an unsuccessful mob hit.  From there, things might play out similar to the film we've got, but with a few tweaks.  We never see Charlie's Heavenly visit in this version.  Instead, he sets out for revenge against Carface, discovers Anne Marie, and the only major deviation would be that she seems to be making an effort to get him to change his ways.  The twist would be to make Annie the angel of this story.  In choosing to save her, Charlie has saved his own soul, and that he's been dead this whole time.  The entire film was this big grand purgatorial journey for him and he passes the test to a higher plain.

Another way you could handle this material is one that combines elements from both the Reynolds film and its sequel.  Maybe instead of a gangster straight out of Damon Runyon trying to save his soul, why not re-shuffle the cards so that it's instead the story of Annabelle the actual angel who suffers some kind of fall from grace, and has to go on her own little redemption arc quest.  Maybe she can be the one who has lost Gabriel's Horn.  She might have done this through a combination of arrogance and conceit about her own importance in the Grand Scheme of Things, and as a result of attempting show off to others just how pious and upright she is, the item of value goes tumbling from the clouds down to Earth.  So it's not long before she gets sent after it.  We don't have to see all of this play out.  We can even open with Annabelle, say, wandering alone at night on a country road that leads into New Orleans.  The only setup you'd need to stablish at first is that she's lost and looking for something that's very important to her.  We don't have to know everything about the MacGuffin, or even what type of being Annabelle is right away.  That can all be part of the plot that gets revealed gradually as the story moves on, until we reach the climax where she has to square off against the devil dog for control of the Horn.  Now try and imagine how awesome and gnarly that would look on-screen.  Especially if we're talking Bluth in his prime directing all of that.  It could be the best type of 80s kids movie trauma!

I even had this idea of a song that could be used for a musical sequence where Annabelle is introduced to human beings for the first time in the form of the hectic, R&B Jazz inflected hustle and bustle of New Orleans night life.  A song by the late, great Robbie Robertson called Go Back to Your Woods would be the ideal song to play here, because if you animated it right (somewhat in a cross between Bluth's style and that of The Princess and the Frog) you'd have a perfect demonstration of the culture clash to be had between the multiplicity of your average human nature and a single celestial visitor from Above encountering this all for the first time.  It would be a good starting point for this alternate Annabelle's character.  It would showcase just how little she knows and out of her depth she is to start with.  I can think of at least two other moments that would demonstrate her development over the course of this elseworlds film.  One would be a moment of contemplation on the banks (followed by a possible stroll on the water) of the Mississippi River.  The third and final one would be a scene of Annabelle searching for the Horn in the midst of a Mardi Gras celebration.  By the time this happens, she's advanced to the point where she's able to join in the dance of the festivities.  By the time we've reached the end, she'll have learned how to have a greater empathy for human beings than before.

I offer all of this up to give at least a few suggestions of how Bluth could have juggled all of the ideas bouncing around in his head.  The fact that he struggled with the two choices of material he had on his hands, and that this struggle winds up in the finished product tells me a lot about the overall quality of All Dogs as a film.  It tells me that I'm dealing with a picture that can't quite make up its mind.  Or at least the director's having an issue or two doing it for himself.  Nowhere is this more obvious than in the way he handles his main character.  It's with the figure of Charlie Barkin that the ultimate deciding factor on the film's quality comes into play.  It goes to the heart of the debates that fans have had about this flick.  The biggest one hinges on a very simple question.  Does the main character even deserve to be forgiven for his actions?  Anyone whose watched the movie knows how it ends.  It's just a matter of whether or not Charlie does much or enough to earn it?  At first, it was one of the most surprising results I've heard back from a not inconsiderable half of the audience.  Then I went and watched that film again.  I was surprised by how much the lead player started to get on my nerves as time went on.

At first I wondered if maybe this was down to the actor.  Burt Reynolds, after all, went on to be one of those guys who's good at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory with his own two hands.  Sooner or later he became very good at diving head first into hot water.  I also remember hearing how he went into the recording booth, chucked out the script he was given, and then went into immediate ad-lib mode, and De Luise, to his credit, was a natural at Improv acting, so he was able to keep up.  Apparently this was a method he and Reynolds had devised when working together on films like Cannonball Run.  So is that the ultimate culprit?  Is throwing away the original script to blame for the film not being all that it could be?  Well, the more I think it over, the more it seems like I'll have to keep that option on the table as at least an option.  At the same time, there's the fact that Bluth found himself confronted with the possibility of telling two different stories on his hand, and not being able to sacrifice either one.  Perhaps this indecision is also responsible for the conflicted nature of how Reynold's character is handled.  The material presents Bluth with a number of choices for what direction to take Charlie in.  One option is to take the safe route, and stick with a softer tone.

The second option could have been the more interesting from a writer's perspective, yet I'm not sure how well it would have handled at the box-office outside of any film directed by the guy who did Taxi Driver.  What I mean is that the other opportunity Bluth might have had was for him to play up the whole Road to Perdition angle with Charlie, and take it as far as his Imagination could go.  In other words, try and see what would happen if you committed to making the character a full out anti-hero.  Commit to making him a hoodlum bent for revenge against the people who doubled-crossed him.  Don't just make it into of "Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better", either.  Write it so that the play goes like one of those classic revenge Noir thrillers from the 30s and 40s.  What would happen if Charlie's obsession of getting even with Carface were to consume him to the point where he starts getting reckless.  Maybe he begins to neglect his duties toward Anne Marie.  Perhaps he begins to forget how to protect that ticking watch around his collar.  In other words, why not see if you can take the script in the kind of direction you're more libel to find in films like Force of Evil, or The Departed?  Now to be honest, do I think such a gamble would have worked?  Well, let me put it this way, what's good for someone like Scorsese runs the risk of being too out of place for a reputation like that of Bluth's.

Even if he found a way to make such a narrative strategy work, odds are even all he would have done then would be to have made a coterie film.  The type of work that could never win mainstream acceptance, and instead ends up getting the sort of under-heralded acclaim from the Art House circuit crowd.  All of which is to say, who knows?  Maybe it's a risk that could have been worth taking.  The idea for an animated film revolving around an anthropomorphic riff on the typical Scorsese protagonist and setup does sound like an intriguing proposition.  It's at least worth speculating that Bluth might have become aware of such a narrative possibility while he was working on the script.  Even if that's the case, though, it's clearly not the road taken in the final product.  I think it's also possible to make a reasonable guess why.  Even if the idea of taking things down a darker avenue occurred to the director, there are still a number of plausible reasons for rejecting it.  In the first place, it might very well have been a question of confidence.  Don Bluth has never been a stranger to exploring the darker aspects of life and art.  In fact, it's sort of become his most identifiable trademark as a animator and director.

You can see it in all his best efforts, and it also crops up here and there in Dogs.  It also doesn't appear to achieve quite the same heights as a movie like The Secret of Nimh, or An American Tail.  The former taps into the brilliant Gothic atmosphere of the fairy tale genre.  The latter, meanwhile, is very much like a trial run for the cinema of Scorsese.  In fact, there's an amusing thread on that score which can and ought to be followed up later.  For now, it's enough to note that these are two examples that everyone and their grandparent can point to as a demonstration of Bluth reaching the pinnacle of his artistic creativity, and not without a lot of good reasons.  So it's interesting to observe him trying to go for that same goal again, and somehow coming off less than stellar compared to those other times.  If we go with the idea that the director was confronted with the chance to take a darker path for his plot, only to reject it either out of a general lack of confidence in his ability to pull that sort of story off, or else because he didn't think the audience would embrace it the way they did with his previous work, then at least we've gotten close to a plausible explanation for the movie as we now have it today.

All Dogs Go to Heaven is a film riddled with inner schisms and self-contradictions.  It wants to follow up on the grittier approaches of the director's last few projects.  And yet we can see him wanting to try and take things in a lighter direction, for some reason.  He found himself confronted with a number of possibilities.  One for a story exploring the Afterlife, and the existential nature of existence.  The other was the chance to take the Noir genre into the animated realm.  The latter choice would also have given him the opportunity to try and take his trademark Dark Style as far as it could go in the service of crafting a cartoon equivalent of Mean Streets, or something like it.  Such a choice, if it were ever to succeed, would have been a case of the artist developing into the next big step in his career.  If he'd won on a gamble like that, there's no telling where his career could have gone.  Faced with all of this potential, Bluth made the most curious decision possible.  He wanted to see if he could combine all these disparate elements into one, and then see if it would work like that.  I think time and tide have proven how difficult it is to cram so many ideas into one package when it's clear there are too many clashing tones and style in the way for it to ever work out like whatever he might have wanted.

The result is this strange patchwork quilt of a film where not all the pieces are able to fit together.  Each strand of the plot wants to branch out into it's own thing, only to get stifled under by whatever necessities Bluth seems to think is needed to make it work.  In this regard, he seems to have been somewhat misguided.  It means that while I can't bring myself to call this a bad film, it's still one that will never be able to achieve the heights reached by a film such as An American Tail.  That's a movie where the plot is also made up of various strands, or threads.  The difference there is that each one is able to develop in a natural way, like several layers of an onion being peeled away, and then put back together.  Every new character or diversion we meet along the way winds up coalescing together seamlessly at the end.  So that the result leaves the audience feeling like it's just seen the equivalent of a Victorian Children's novel.  Something akin to Huck Finn or Great Expectations.  It doesn't hurt that the approach of the Spielberg collaboration is perhaps meant to mimic the feel of those kinds of texts.  This time, however, the threads of Noir and Metaphysical Thriller were unable to come together.  It doesn't make for a bad film.  It's just going to have to settle for a permanent cult classic shelf life status.

In some ways, I feel as if an apology is owed as I close out this article.  I came in here expecting to write a straightforward review about a forgotten Bob Hope comedy.  What I realized as I went along, however, is that this was flick that was so much a part of the legacy tapestry that Don Bluth wove out of the long and involved history of a Damon Runyon short story that I soon realized it would be impossible to discuss this simple Screwball flick in full without acknowledging and addressing the more famous shadow that tends to loom over it.  Having got that out of the way, what I have to say next sort of has no choice except to sound strange.  I'm forced to conclude that Hope's efforts amount to a forgotten classic.  That part might sound fair enough.  The oddity comes from me being able to say that it does a better job of entertaining than Bluth was able to provide in this case.  I also said I had to put up a Trigger Warning for a reason.  With that in mind, taken on it's own terms, the Hope version is able to stand on its own four feet.  It's not as complicated as it's animated counterpart, and the curious thing is how this is ultimately able to work in it's favor.  Lanfield knows what type of film he's making.

It's a simple character study about a group of people caught in the dark underbelly of the American Dream, and who have just enough of a conscience left between them to be willing to take the risk of "getting out of the racket".  Or, like I said, running away from the circus to join real life.  In that sense, the major difference the 49 film has with it's 89 counterpart is that it's focus remains fixed on the comedic potential of Runyon's work.  And, strangely enough, it actually works in the picture's favor.  It might sound strange to hear that a film lacking the qualities found in Bluth's remake could come out with a greater sense of narrative coherence, and yet because Lanfield isn't trying to keep so many plates spinning in the air, he's allowed to concentrate on all the inherent strengths of the material he does have to work with.  In his case it left the filmmaker with a Comedy of Errors and Manners happening amidst old New York's underworld.  It's plot might be simple compared to its successor, and yet the strange thing is how this allows the director to expand on the characters and their motivations.  We're able to have a clearer understanding of Hope's version of Charlie, and what he's going through as the lead.

This iteration of the character is less difficult to get a read on and what he reveals about himself as the film goes on is kind of ironic in terms of its results.  Maybe now is the place for yet another Trigger Warning, because what I'm about to say could be controversial.  I think Bob Hope plays this character better than Burt Reynolds.  Now here me out!  A lot of this is down to the skills of the actors involved, and the way they show up the contrasts between each other when you compare beside each other.  Make no mistake, Reynolds is a very good actor in his own right.  He has his own style of the playing heroic rogue, and when the writing is there, and he has something to work with, he can deliver like a pro.  At the same time, there's always this dark edge to a lot of his work.  This holds true even when he's at his most charming, like in Smokey and the Bandit.  There's always a lot of hard bark on this guy, even when he tries to tone things down for a child audience.  That's why it's very enlightening to compare his performance in Bluth's film with that of Bob Hope in Lanfield's.  There's not much commentary to be had about Hope's role as an actor, and yet what little exists does reveal a bit of interesting trivia.

One thing that jumps out at you about Hope's filmography is the specific sort of typecasting he wound up with in his career.  His natural talents lent itself more toward the genre of Comedy than anything else.  So since it's what he was good at, that's where the Studios kept him.  The important thing to note about this is the specific type of roles Hope was given to work with.  In just about every picture he ever did, Hope found himself always playing the same combo-role.  He was the Casanova Wannabe crossed with the Lovable Coward (web).  These are just two aspects going together to make up the typical Hope persona of the feckless Everyman figure who is perpetually way in over his head (and he knows it), yet whose heart is always inevitably in the right place.  In that sense, Hope is playing something a riff on the typical Burt Reynolds role.  The later actor is always playing the tough guy, while Hope is this Joe Average schlub who would like to be tough, yet knows he never can.  The key to the way they handle their shared main character, whether in Sorrowful Jones or All Dogs Go to Heaven, all comes down to the type of performance they give to the role, and how that shapes the way he is received by the audience.  Reynolds is an unclear tough guy, whereas Hope is more of this upbeat wiseacre.

With this difference between the two actors in mind, when it comes to deciding which film I prefer more, I find myself drawn to whichever version of the protagonist allows for a greater overall sense of enjoyment in what I'm watching.  It's with this criteria that I'm able to say that if I'm being honest (Final Trigger Warning), I find that Hope is able to steal the spotlight from Reynolds, hands down.  I know how that must sound like a blasphemy, yet I'll swear its true.  At least it's the same reaction I've come away with after having a chance to look at the two films together.  The Black and White one just has a better sense of narrative focus.  The plot is understandable.  There are less characters and side threads to have to sort out.  Any Metaphysical aspects there might be to the story are delineated in such a way that they don't distract from the main action, and hence threaten to runaway with the narrative.  It's even got a version of Charles Reilly's Killer, except this version is more than willing to live up to his name.  Let's just say if Carface gave Killer's human counterpart any lip, this guy would just grab him by the scruff of the neck and hurl him to King Gator with his own bare hands without so much as a second thought.

Above all of this, Hope demonstrates a consummate skill in being able to take the same role that was played by Burt Reynolds, and managing to create a more relatable character out of it.  His version just has this natural, amiable charm about him.  You really get the sense that we're dealing with a genuine nice guy who happens to be caught up in a life of crime.  Sure he's familiar with all a lot of the "tricks of the trade", but unlike Charlie, he never even considers resorting to the same violent methods as his enemies.  This iteration is more apt to turn tail at the first sight of trouble, unless Anne Marie/Martha Jane is in trouble.  He's able to imbue the character with this quick-witted affability that makes him endearing, even as he's placing illegal bets.  He's so good at playing up the good natured qualities of his character that you almost want him to succeed in his attempts at being a white collar thief.  The filmmakers seemed to have realized that Hope's innate personal charm and charisma was key to the movie's success.  He was one of those performers with the ability to have the audience in the palm of his hand the minute he walks on screen.  Perhaps one of the biggest surprises lying in wait for anyone who chooses to dig up this film is the sight of an old timer who knew a thing or two about winning the audience over to his side, and being able to do it without the aid of special effects or fancy stunts.

Instead, all Hope has to rely on is his skills as a comic, and his agility at utilizing them for every scene he's in leaves one with the impression that we are watching someone who was as close to being the Bill Murray or John Candy of Hollywood's Golden Age as we're ever likely to get.  I also discovered that if you put Hope in the same room with Lucille Ball, the combination of two natural born cut ups is more than enough to earn the price of admission.  Lucy surprised me by turning on a different sort of charm for this picture, one that had the remarkable effect of reminding me of Gillian Anderson.  That was a surprisingly gratifying experience.  The combined strength of the film's two leads, plus a tighter script that knows where to keep its focus has resulted in unearthing this nice little hidden gem of a movie.  It's true we're not dealing with like The Godfather, or anything.  Then again, why does something like this even have to be?  Instead, a film like this has more than one good use.  On the one hand, it's the best kind of family feature that you can show to young kids as a nice bit of entertainment.  It's a great way to get young minds interested in artists like Lucy and Bob Hope.  For adults, meanwhile, it's a multi-purpose motion picture that can stand on its own merits, even as it fits as a missing piece in a much larger and fascinating puzzle.  All of this gets Sorrowful Jones a well-earned recommendation from me.