We get another spate of Reno divorce movies in the late 1930s, none especially distinguished but most with some very interesting aspects, not least their folding Reno into the Charlie Chan and Mexican Spitfire franchises.
Secret Valley (1937)
Secret Valley stars the pretty Virginia Grey, who reminds me a bit of Carole Lombard, and may have reminded Clark Gable of her too since they were romantically involved after Gable’s wife Lombard tragically died at the age of 33. In the film, Grey learns a few hours after her wedding that her husband is a notorious gangster and she sneaks off from New York to Reno to get a divorce. She finds new love on a ranch, though she has to prove to cowboy Richard Arlen that she is tough enough to handle life out west. The gangsters show up to grab Grey, but her cowboy beau fights them off until the FBI shows up and—very FBI—shoots the head gangster in the back as he tries to flee. The Feds were going to charge him with tax evasion, like Al Capone.
You wouldn’t think this slight B-picture would get me thinking, but it did. “The two most successful creations of American movies,” wrote critic Robert Warshow in 1954, “are the gangster and the Westerner: men with guns.” In two landmark essays, Warshow famously reflected on the similarities and differences between these two figures, both violent, solitary, in conflict with societal norms.
Watching Secret Valley, it occurred to me that I can think of surprisingly few movies that pair gangsters and cowboys, even though they are indeed two great American film icons. In fact, this movie may be the only one to do so. The Patrick Swayze vehicle Next of Kin pits gangsters against Harlan County hillbillies (including Liam Neeson, living in a run-down trailer with a Confederate flag!), but that, like the far better TV series Justified, isn’t the same thing. The two American icons had to have been on David Mamet’s mind when he wrote The Untouchables and put the Federal agents on horseback in one scene.
Moreover, the examples above all have the gangster and the cowboy on opposite sides. But both are, as Warshow observed, tragic heroes. They both embody an American independence and toughness that must be—and has been—targeted by the regime. The film I’d like to see wouldn’t pit them against each other, but rather would team them up against corporate corruption and neoliberal state force. The urban soldier and the frontier survivalist—certainly fighting each other at first, and probably with some competition over a girl—but ultimately realizing that they have more in common than anything that separates them, and a common enemy in the blob that wants to turn us all into obedient consumers and state subjects.
Give me Clint Eastwood with Al Pacino, Cagney with Cooper, John Wayne with Tony Soprano! I even have a film title: “Spaghetti Western.”
The Road to Reno (1938)
Not to be confused with the 1931 film of the same name, this movie marks silent film star Hope Hampton’s return to film, with her husband directing. Hampton plays an opera singer (Hampton actually has a wonderful singing voice) who somehow got married to a Nevada rancher who doesn’t want her to live in New York and have a career. Now she goes to Reno to get a divorce, on the way befriending a wisecracking aviatrix seeking her fourth.
It’s a forced and silly film, with some twists and turns, as the cowboy husband refuses to give the divorce and competes with Hampton’s high society new flame, before husband and wife reunite. The fish-out-of-water plot of the eastern girl on the Nevada ranch is warmed-over, as is the role of character actor Willie Fung as the comic Chinese cook in both this film and the earlier Secret Valley. There is the whiff of something more serious in the Reno intersection of fading frontier cowboys and the coastal wealthy seeking to remedy their marital mistakes, but that isn’t where the film is limping to. In the end, husband and wife simply agree to spend half of each year in New York City so that Hampton can continue her singing career.
Charlie Chan in Reno (1939)
Willie Fung’s Chinee is a partly endearing, partly cringe-inducing stereotype; not so Charlie Chan. Granted, it is a little odd to see the character played by the obviously white actor Sidney Toler when his son and son’s love interest are played by Asian-American actors Victor Sen Yung and Iris Wong. But I was pleasantly surprised seeing this, my first Charlie Chan movie (apart from the Peter Sellers send-up in Murder By Death), and not having been sure what to expect. Chan is called to Reno by a family friend to help an innocent woman framed for murder. Her husband was divorcing her and planning to marry the murder victim.
Toler’s Chan is admired by almost everyone he comes in contact with. A celebrity detective, and always ready with a grammatically stilted bon mot, the unflappable Chan runs circles around the cast of suspects. Not only does the film emphasize how liked and respected the character is, it even provides a foil in a bumbling local yokel sheriff who does not trust the outsider Chan (it’s not clear if the sheriff is racist or simply wants to hang his suspect and call it a day), and is constantly shown up by the great detective. The film further shows its integrationist bona fides by introducing us to Chan’s son Jimmy at the University of Southern California working in the chemistry lab alongside his white classmates and friends. And at one point Iris Wong and Toler launch into an exchange in Chinese.
Another pleasant surprise is that this is a whodunnit that gives you a fair shot of figuring out whodunnit. I’d watch another Charlie Chan mystery. And I like his wry humor. When called to the case he announces: “Will go pack and notify family in person. Just so honorable wife will not misunderstand contemplated visit to Reno.”
Reno (1939)
How did Reno become America’s divorce Mecca anyway? We find out in this curious B movie—mediocre as a film but fascinating in its decision to make the origins of the Reno divorce industry the center of its sentimental plot.
We begin with the familiar Reno montage: saloons, casinos, the courthouse, the wedding ring thrown into the Truckee River, the “biggest little city in the world” in neon. Bill Shane (portrayed by Richard Dix) is a casino owner. Accused of rigging the roulette table at his establishment, he tells his life story to the court, a story that “started way back when divorce was something that you just read about in those eastern scandal sheets.”
Flashing back to 1905, Shane, a young lawyer, arrives in a Reno that, his voiceover tells us, is “mostly miners, cowboys, and muleskinners,” a town of saloons and prostitutes, with “everything going out, nothing much coming in.” The town depends upon its silver mines, and the silver mines are controlled by a small conglomerate. When the young Shane successfully challenges their predatory business practices in court, the bigwigs retaliate by fixing the price of silver. Reno becomes a ghost town, its remaining citizens reduced to pawning their possessions.
Then Shane receives unexpected payment for a one-off pro bono case he had taken, helping a woman divorce her husband. He had figured out an obscure law would allow divorce with a relatively short residency in Reno. It turns out the woman was no damsel in distress with a cruel husband; she really wanted her divorce in order to marry a very wealthy man. The new husband is so grateful that he has sent Shane a check for one thousand dollars.
Shane sees a way of bringing life back to Reno, and to his own flagging fortunes as a lawyer. Married and with a baby daughter at home, he is determined to provide for his family and save his town. “I’m going to make Reno the biggest little city in the world,” he vows.
One montage later (people arriving by train, the city growing, gambling booming, stacks of money), Shane’s office is swamped with clients, mostly women. We notice that they all seem to be divorcing for selfish and materialistic reasons and that he is helping them fabricate cruelty cases. The woman whose first divorce he helped arrange is back seeking her second. Moreover, the female clients come on to him, and he is as busy deflecting their flirtations as arranging their cases.
No wonder he and his wife (Gail Patrick) grow estranged. She was always opposed to his involvement in divorce cases. When the first one came along she cautioned him: “Decent women don’t get divorces. You’re not that kind of a lawyer, Bill.” Now he is spending most of his time out gambling and in the company of his clients. She reluctantly divorces him—hoping he will challenge the case—and in sorrow throws her ring into the river and leaves town with her daughter and a new husband. Shane is disbarred over some technicalities and, a broken man, turns to the casino life.
Of course, this is not exactly a historically accurate account of the origins of Reno’s divorce industry, which was not the creation of one legal entrepreneur but gathered steam in the first years of the twentieth century, helped by a few celebrity cases, media attention, and a business community that saw the economic benefit of Nevada supplanting other divorce destinations such as Wyoming, Oregon, and Indiana.
The movie’s Bill Shane is loosely based on a New York lawyer named William Schnitzer, who moved to Reno in 1907 and was the first to advertize his services back east. According to the excellent Reno Divorce History website developed by the University of Nevada, Reno library:
[Schnitzer] published a pamphlet outlining Nevada’s divorce procedure—highlighting his own expertise on the subject, of course. Schnitzer placed advertisements for his pamphlet in Eastern newspapers and even on theater curtains. Because advertising the divorce trade was strictly forbidden at the time, Schnitzer was disbarred by the Washoe County Bar Association for his entrepreneurial efforts, although he was later reinstated.
The highly fictionalized version of Schnitzer in the movie says, by contrast: “He started the Reno divorce wheel turning. But when it hit his own life he yelled like a baby.”
When we return to the framing courtroom scene of the film at the end, we learn that the crooked roulette wheel was an attempt to prevent a young woman from winning at gambling, and so force her to return to her husband and reconcile rather than stay in Reno for her divorce. That woman, as has been obvious for some time, is Shane’s now-grown daughter, who drops the charges and does indeed return to her husband—bringing along her dear old father. His ex-wife is dead but, we learn, never stopped loving him.
The Mexican Spitfire Out West (1940)
This is the third entry in the “Mexican Spitfire” series of eight popular comedies from the early 1940s starring Mexican actress Lupe Vélez, who plays the feisty wife of an American advertising executive, occasionally helping him but more often creating chaos as he is trying to close business deals. It’s Bewitched but with a Mexican instead of a witch.
The preposterous plot sends all of the characters to Reno: Vélez (who pretends to seek a divorce so that her husband will pay attention to her), her husband Denny, Denny’s snobbish aunt who disapproves of Vélez, Denny’s kindly Uncle Matt who goes to any lengths to help out Vélez, the always tipsy British aristocrat (and biggest client of Denny’s ad firm) Lord Epping, a rival ad exec, and a few others besides.
Audiences enjoyed these films, but Vélez is limited here to two shticks: angry tirades in Spanish like a Latina Donald Duck, and cute malapropisms and accented misunderstandings like a Latina Chico Marx. The film is carried by comedian Leon Errol, who plays both Uncle Matt and Lord Epping, as well as Uncle Matt disguised as Lord Epping. (The movie is an extended doppelganger gag.) Errol actually has more screen time than Vélez, and would continue making movies as his Lord Epping character even after Vélez’s tragic (and much misrepresented) suicide in 1944.