Cinema Revisited: The Gang's All Here (1941)

Directed by Jean Yarbrough.

Starring Frankie Darro, Mantan Moreland, Marcia Mae Jones, Jackie Moran, Keye Luke, Robert Homans, Ivring Mitchell, Ed Cassidy, Pat Gleason, Jack Kenney, Jack Ingram, Paul Bryar, Laurence Criner, Lee Bennett, Herman Hack

Released by Monogram Pictures on June 11, 1941. Running Time: 61 minutes

In a 1938 movie fan magazine, a girl named Deena Ward of New Jersey wrote in stating that Mickey Rooney, then the number one box office star of the nation, was wearing thin on her due to his mugging, and she wondered why Frankie Darro wasn’t the bigger star. Deena pointed out Darro’s performance in the Columbia B movie “Juvenile Court” as her example. When I interviewed Mickey Rooney he remembered Frankie Darro as “a good actor and a nice person. I always liked Frankie.”

There are some similarities between Rooney and Darro. While Frankie never reached the superstardom Rooney did, both had trouble finding work after serving their country during World War Two. And while Darro kept active until his passing on Christmas Day in 1976, his last starring film was in 1941.

One of the highlights of Darro’s career was a spate of cheap, aggressive B movies for Monogram Pictures, in which he was teamed with African American comedian Mantan Moreland. These movies stand out first for their timeless entertainment, but also for the somewhat headier issue of Mantan as a full-fledged co-star, and not a supporting player. Darro and Moreland do not function as a comedy team a’la Abbott and Costello, they co-star as buddies. In fact, their movies were among the very first "buddy pictures" long before that term was utilized to describe co-stars like Robert DeNiro and Charles Grodin in "Midnight Run" or Will Smith and Martin Lawrence in "Bad Boys."

“The Gang’s All Here” is one of the very best of Darro and Moreland's films together. In this one, Frankie and Mantan get jobs with a trucking outfit that is having trouble keeping drivers because a rival unit is attacking them in order to take over the market. The narrative is standard and fairly predictable, with kidnappings, fist fights, misunderstandings, and last minute evidence proving who was innocent and who was guilty. But it is the sort of predictability that is accepted as the sort of B movie formula of the pre-war period that was always entertaining even if only a purely visceral level.

What is great here is the banter between Darro and Moreland. Darro is the tough kid, still trading off the role he’d established himself with in William Wellman’s “Wild Boys of The Road” (1933). Moreland, usually cast in scare comedies so he can do his “feets do yo stuff” routines, is this time a competent, wise-cracking partner who maintains his own presence. When we realize that this is the era of segregation, nearly a quarter century before the civil rights act, the idea of a black and white buddy duo working together in a trucking outfit and battling saboteurs is impressively progressive. Extend that to casting Asian American actor Keye Luke as an insurance rep making his own investigation, and the multicultural casting becomes even more remarkable.

There is a distracting sub-plot with Darro and Jackie Moran as rivals for the attention of cute Marcia Mae Jones, but the movie is essentially an action drama with touches of comedy. The effective and competent direction by B movie specialist Jean Yarbrough helps maintain the narrative structure.

Not long after this film was released, Frankie Darro enlisted in the service . After the war, he returned home to find it hard to get roles in films. He briefly returned to Monogram for a few movies in the Teen Agers series, then got a regular job and used acting merely to supplement his income. In the early 1950s, when his low budget films were put on television, newspaper reporters went to interview him at a tavern where he was working as a bartender.

Mantan Moreland also remained active, soon doing his most memorable work in the recurring role of Birmingham Brown in the Charlie Chan series once it went from 20th Century Fox to Monogram. This role made him so popular, it increased his stage bookings and expanded his movie opportunities. By the civil rights era, Mantan’s comedy was considered a bad stereotype by those who were unaware of his buddy movies with Frankie Darro that made an underlying statement about equality decades before it was a cause celebre.

“The Gang’s All Here” is in the public domain, readily available in several low budget DVD packages, and can be found complete on some internet video streaming sites.