Here Comes Mr. Lucky Jordan

LUCKY JORDAN is an entertaining wartime comedy-thriller starring Alan Ladd and directed by the sometimes-excellent Frank Tuttle. It’s on a similar pattern to the later MR. LUCKY, which starred Cary Grant, a considerably more charming rogue than Laddie. But it has a nice, indirect approach to its propaganda message — Ladd plays Jordan, a gangster who wants to avoid the draft (War is Bad for Business) and, having failed to do so, goes AWOL and becomes involved in a plot to sell military secrets to the enemy. It becomes apparent to anyone who’s seen a few movies that Jordan is due for a Damascene conversion after which he will do his patriotic duty, but the movie makes us wait, and wait, well aware that a character doing all the WRONG things is more entertaining than some noble paragon. It just about overcomes the central difficulty, which is that Jordan is a bit TOO loathsome, and Ladd doesn’t have the right kind of charisma to make us enjoy this.

Amusingly, even at the end of the story, supposedly reformed, Jordan is still all in favour of flat-out murdering all his opponents.

The script is persistently witty, in ways that are often surprising, and the more Ladd plays it straight the more effective it is. There’s also one extremely striking set, Jordan’s office, courtesy of Hans Dreier and Ernst Fegté, and strong support. Mabel Paige plays an old souse roped in to masquerade as Jordan’s mother, who gets caught up in the role, method-style, and pleasing villainy is supplied by Miles Mander, dastardly rake-thin fifth columnist (no column that slender could provide reliable structural support), and John Wengraf, distinguished Nazi creep.

Fiona and I were mainly drawn by the presence of baby-faced Helen Walker, supporting attraction of Shadowplay favourite CLUNY BROWN (“the Honorable Betty Cream” who “sits a horse well” and “doesn’t go everywhere”). Her career — and life — suffered a terrible blow in 1946 when she picked up three hitchhiking soldiers and then crashed her car, killing one of them. The surviving veterans accused her of having been drunk, and speeding. It’s kind of miraculous that she had any kind of career at all after that — she lost one major role she’d been set to play, and took on darker material (NIGHTMARE ALLEY, THE BIG COMBO, both memorable) since her bright and cheerful image had been irrevocably tainted.

LUCKY JORDAN was her debut, and she’s delightful in it, but the scenes riding in a car with a uniformed Ladd are a little uncomfortable, foreboding, in the light of what was to happen to her.