I Can Get It for You Wholesale (1951)

The Siren's mentioned the previous life she spent behind a jewelry counter. She recalls one slow morning spent poring over a society column about a New York designer and his haute summer doings in the Hamptons, and her coworker's loud snort: "Sweetie, don't let the yacht fool you. He started out pushing racks around the garment district. He's tougher than you and me will ever think about being."

This nostalgic vignette came to mind when the Siren spent a sick day watching I Can Get It for You Wholesale, the 1951 Twentieth-Century Fox melodrama about the Seventh Avenue rag trade here in Little Old New York. Fashion has doubled, maybe even quintupled its everyday presence since the 50s. Now we play "who wore it best?" for all the world as though anyone strolling the local mall knows exactly how the latest Alber Elbaz should be draped. But the Siren strongly suspects the industry has stayed as tough as ever. She only wishes this movie, so brilliant through a good stretch of its running time, had done the same.

Filmed on location, I Can Get It for You Wholesale has any number of things going for it, but two stand out. First there's the street photography, night and day, crowds and traffic and windows from Seventh Avenue to Central Park. Director Michael Gordon was, on the evidence of this movie as well as Pillow Talk and Portrait in Black, good, if not quite great; we'll always have a hard time knowing how much Gordon really had, because his career is bisected by the blacklist. Gordon has a flair for amusing shots, like an errand boy with his hand cradling a dress dummy's boob, and the camera tracking around a grand dinner-dance to reveal the main characters stuck out behind a pillar. He could keep the action flowing. And the New York street scenes, via DP Milton Krasner — trust the Siren, you will plotz.

The second, and primary, thing: Abraham Polonsky's script (from Vera Caspary's adaptation), which will put the true lover of New Yorkese into a euphoric trance. Leads and character actors such as Marvin Kaplan and Charles Lane reel out line after glittering line, from the poignant

If I had money, could you learn to love me for my money?

to the flowery

Miss Boyd, you have the simple and astonishing beauty of an old-fashioned straight razor.

to the existentially profound

A young man needs a bankruptcy. It helps him to mature.

to the profoundly vaudeville.

—Haven't we treated you right?
—You want more money?
—We'll give you a raise.
—You wanna take your wife to Jones Beach? I'll lend you my Buick.
—Take my Cadillac.
—Take my wife!

My beloved auteurist friends, this is why the Siren has been known to roll her eyes when told a great director could direct the phone book or whatever platitude you will. In this case, it's the reverse. You'd have to work at messing up that dialogue. The script sings. At times Gordon is just getting the hell out of the way.

Harriet Boyd (Susan Hayward) is a model on Seventh Avenue, back when the profession was a lot more B-girl than Bundchen. She's had it up to her cute little keister with pawing buyers and slick salesmen, and she's ready to use her design talent. Harriet lures Sam Cooper (Sam Jaffe), the "inside man" who can run the dressmaking end, and salesman Teddy Sherman (Dan Dailey, as good as you'll ever see him), with the promise of their own firm, selling frocks at $10.95 in wholesale 1951 dollars. To get what she wants, Harriet will be every bit as tough as that Hamptons-swanning designer. She needs the life-insurance money her mother is hoarding, but Ma wants younger sister Marge to have it so she can start a cozy washer-dryer-baby household, despite Harriet's solid objections:

Harriet: With money she can marry anyone she wants.
Ma: A nice outlook on life.
Harriet: It's the outlook men taught me.

Ma, whose maternal warmth recalls an Easter Island statue, refuses to fork over, so Harriet manipulates sis into giving her the dough anyway, in a set-up worthy of Scarlett O'Hara. (That's a part for which Hayward was a contender, by the by, and here you can tell why that's not so far-fetched.) Afterward sister, Ma and brother-in-law, none of whom are the slightest bit interesting, obligingly take a powder. The partners conquer Seventh Avenue, but Teddy has a yen for Harriet, and there lies both Harriet and the movie's undoing.




The Siren has written before of her soft spot for Hayward, who isn't often trotted out these days when people discuss Great Stars of the Past. Hayward was born Edythe Marrener in Flatbush, and no matter what the role, Brooklyn swung in her stride and sanded the edges of her husky voice. She got her start as a teenaged New York model, which probably gives extra brush to the brush-offs Hayward delivers in the film, but she was no high-flown Method actress. Hayward was one rock-hard cookie.

But the Siren says when the part fit her, Hayward could play the hell out of it. TV Guide has one of the few I Can Get It for You Wholesale reviews on the Web, and it cluck-clucks through a story about Hayward's movie-star airs. Hey, the Siren loves the stars who love their status, whether it's Hayward signing a gazillion autographs, Bette Davis showing up on 1970s talk shows to blow smoke and imitate her imitators, or Gloria Swanson playing herself in Airport 1975 and ruining the suspense because face it, nothing and nobody's gonna kill Gloria Swanson. What's the appeal of someone who approaches stardom like this gal? Brother, says the Siren, in her best Brooklyn, you can have that.

Harriet in all her gimme-gimme glory is Hayward at her best. She moves like she knows she's beautiful, she smiles like she knows what she's gonna get, she snaps her lines like she knows what's working against her.

"Didn't you hear me? I'm proposing to you," says a flummoxed Teddy. "What do you expect me to do, throw my arms around you?" is Harriet's tender response.

One more thing: this is a George Sanders movie, too. He shows up about a half-hour in, at a Dressmakers and Buyers' Ball, where he's seated at the dais. Of course. Did any man in Hollywood history, or indeed the history of anywhere, ever look so completely right seated at a dais? Sanders plays J.F. Noble, the Bergdorf-type magnate who wants Harriet to design evening gowns and who also wants Harriet for himself, a promising development both ways. You don't know how it pains the Siren to reveal that Sanders' appearance signals that we have about 30 minutes of great left. After that, it's comeuppance time for Harriet. Oh, you still get good stuff and standout Sanders, such as, "It seems to me that you could resign yourself a little more gracefully to being rich and famous." And Sanders also manages to turn "Good evening, Mr. Sherman" into one of his funniest lines.

But — and it's so obvious this is where we're headed, the Siren isn't even going to call it a spoiler — it's time for Harriet to Learn a Few Things About Love.

I Can Get for You Wholesale is based on Jerome Weidman's Depression-era novel about a man named Harry who, so Wikipedia tells us, gets what's coming to him and learns to appreciate love. (Later, the story morphed into the Broadway musical debut of Barbra Streisand, which interesting tale can be read here.)

It's a truth universally acknowledged in Hollywood that a single woman in possession of excess ambition must be in want of a man. That she'll die without a man, nothing matters without a man, she might as well call in Mario Buatta and have her uterus turned into a breakfast nook without a man. Still, it would be a mistake to say this applies only to women; many's the manly magnate presumed to need love more than money, too. After all, it is love, or his version of it, that proves the undoing of Charles Foster Kane, and we all know how the Siren feels about that one. And it's a mistake to chalk things up to the era, when here's winsome Anne Hathaway in 2006's The Devil Wears Prada doing the exact same thing.

Over at Senses of Cinema, Andrew Marsden says Polonsky changed the novel's "anti-Semitism arising from its treatment of Jewish businessmen into a story about the oppression of women in the world of business," and adds that Fox "softened" the dialogue. The Siren doesn't know if that softening extended to Harriet's fate, but it should be said that Teddy wants her to have a career, just a career on his salesman-of-the-people terms.

Sweet shade of Fannie Hurst, it's frustrating, though. It isn't that the romantic choice boils down to George Sanders versus Dan Dailey, which is…the Siren doesn't even have an actor-to-actor metaphor for that one. It's more like choosing between a movie star and a windup tin mouse. It isn't even that Harriet's going all mushy is about as believable as when William Makepeace Thackeray tries to convince you that his fabulous Becky Sharp is (dramatic pause) a murderess.

No, the rub is that the trick Teddy and Sam pull on Harriet, an S.O.B. move if ever there was one, is for her own good. Done out of love, you see, which makes it so much more pure than Harriet's own scheming.

Despite her dislike of the denouement the Siren highly recommends the film, which you can see at MUBI. It's one of Hollywood's nasty ironies that the lavishly talented Polonsky, himself no bed of roses, also was defanged by external forces. The Siren likes to believe that Polonsky looked back at Harriet Boyd from time to time and thought she got a raw deal, too.