Manhattan Melodrama
Manhattan Melodrama is a 1934 American pre-Code crime film, produced by MGM, directed by W. S. Van Dyke, and starring Clark Gable, William Powell, and Myrna Loy. The movie also provided one of Mickey Rooney's earliest film roles. (Rooney played Gable's character as a child.) The film is based on a story by Arthur Caesar, who won the Academy Award for Best Original Story. It was also the first of Myrna Loy and William Powell's fourteen screen pairings.
Plot
On June 15, 1904, the steamboat General Slocum catches fire and sinks in New York's East River. Two boys, Blackie Gallagher (Mickey Rooney) and Jim Wade (Jimmy Butler), are rescued by a priest, Father Joe (Leo Carrillo), but are orphaned by the disaster. They are taken in by another survivor, Poppa Rosen (George Sidney), who lost his young son in the sinking. The boys live with Poppa Rosen for a short while; then Rosen, a Russian Jew, is trampled to death by a policeman's horse after he heckles Leon Trotsky at a Communist rally and a melee breaks out.
Awards
More details
| author | Joseph L. Mankiewicz |
|---|---|
| award | Academy Award for Best Story |
| contentLocation | New York City |
| director | George Cukor W. S. Van Dyke |
| editor | Ben Lewis |
| events | capital punishment |
| genre | crime drama |
| keywords | assistant district attorney beg begin best man communist rally cotton club death penalty death sentence district attorney electric chair end gambling debts general slocum horse track keeping company kill last chance last rites leon trotsky life imprisonment madison square garden married new life orphan ps general slocum rescue sentenced to death sing sing thomas e. jackson trampled to death unsolved wait wed |
| musicBy | William Axt |
| nomination | Academy Award for Best Story |
| producer | David O. Selznick |
| productionCompany | Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer |
| publisher | Loews Cineplex Entertainment |
| theme | gangster melodrama |