CMBA Fall Blogathon featuring the 1927 Louise Brooks' film The City Gone Wild

The theme of the 2018 CMBA Fall Blogathon is Outlaws, which I am stretching to include gangsters and the criminal underworld (i.e. those outside the law). The focus of this blog is the 1927 Louise Brooks film The City Gone Wild.

Now considered a lost film, The City Gone Wild is a terse crime drama, with gangsters, gangs, and gunfights, in which a criminal lawyer turns prosecutor to avenge the death of a friend. As she did in The Street of Forgotten Men, Louise Brooks plays a moll, this time the deliciously named Snuggles Joy, the “gunman’s honey.”

The story, by Charles & Jules Furthman, goes like this: “With the outbreak of city gang wars between Gunner Gallagher and Lefty Schroeder, criminal lawyer John Phelan, feared in the underworld, brings temporary peace, while district attorney Franklin Ames investigates. Nada Winthrop, daughter of a powerful capitalist, is sought by both men. Though Nada loves John, she disapproves of his criminal practice; and when he frees Gunner Gallagher on bail, she announces her engagement to Ames. When Ames discovers that her father is the secret brain of the underworld activities and Winthrop has him killed, John takes the district attorneyship to avenge his friend. Snuggles, Gunner’s girl, threatens to inform on Winthrop unless John releases Gunner, and he concedes; John is about to resign when Snuggles, rejected by her man, confesses.” Screenplay credits went to Charles Furthman, and title credits to Herman J. Mankiewicz.

The “gangster film” (as we know it today) more-or-less began with Paramount’s Underworld (1927). Though there were earlier crime films, the Joseph von Sternberg directed Underworld set the tone for many of the genre films which followed, namely Little Caesar (1931), The Public Enemy (1931), and Scarface (1932).

With the surprising success of Underworld, Paramount quickly put another crime film into production, namely The City Gone Wild. The film, originally titled First Degree Murder, was meant as a vehicle for leading man Thomas Meighan, who in 1927 saw his star start to fade. To boost his career, Paramount paired Meighan with a topical story “ripped from the headlines,” a first rate director (James Cruze), and popular supporting actors (including Louise Brooks). Also assigned to The City Gone Wild were individuals who had worked on Underworld, namely writer Charles Furthman, cinematographer Bert Glennon, and tough-guy actor Fred Kohler.

The two films, not surprisingly, were sometimes compared. Intoning the slang of the time, Variety wrote, “The gang stuff is a la Underworld — machine guns and plenty tough. The two main yeggs each have a moll carrying their gat in the pocketbook. Very authentic in these little details ….” Many focused on the acting and actors. The noted critic Ward M. Marsh of the Cleveland Plain Dealer stated, ” . . . pitting her against crookdom’s love of Louise Brooks brings out the worst in all of us. On the credit side is Miss Brooks and also Fred Kohler in a role paralleling his Mulligan in Underworld. They do excellent work.” The San Antonio Express echoed Marsh, “Although Meighan is featured in the cast, he has his co-stars, Louise Brooks, one of Paramount’s niftiest, and Fred Kohler, remembered for his great crook work in Rough Riders and Underworld.”

Critics noticed Brooks’ hard-boiled character, and the edge she brought to an otherwise atypical role. Radie Harris of the New York Morning Telegraph wrote, “Louise Brooks is in the cast and that is something to grow ecstatic about. Christened with the preposterous name of Snuggles Joy, she is the most entrancing crook that ever pulled a Holt. No wonder the city went wild.”

Gordon Hillman of the Boston Daily Advertiser wrote “Another distinct ornament of the cast is Louise Brooks, who lends considerable vividness to her portrait of a lady of the underworld. In fact, she gives so good an interpretation of the part that Marietta Millner, supposedly the feminine lead, actually relapses into only secondary importance.”


Brooks was so good that she out shown Millner, who had appeared earlier in the year with Meighan in the Cruze directed film We’re All Gamblers. “Louise Brooks, who plays the crook’s girl, is better looking, more attractive and a better actress than Marietta Millner, the district attorney’s jeune fille, and in real life Tommy probably would have preferred her to Marietta,” wrote Stanley Orne in the Portland Oregonian. “Louise Brooks, the pert flapper, completely shadows the more important role allotted to Marietta Millner, and the ‘girl of Gunner Gallagher’ brief as her part is, is a far more intriguing character than the society girl of Miss Millner,” added Leona Pollack of the Omaha World Herald.

The City Gone Wild was officially released November 12, 1927, with a stated length of 6 reels (5,408 feet), or approximately 60 minutes. [Pre-release Paramount production records list the film length at 6 reels (5,601 feet) for the domestic release, and 6 reels (5,390 feet) for the foreign release.] The film opened across the United States on November 6, 1927, with screenings in Atlanta, Georgia, Boston, Massachusetts, San Francisco, California and elsewhere.

The City Gone Wild is considered lost. The film was shown in Fairbanks, Alaska as late as January, 1930, and was largely extant as recently as 1971. In his 1990 book, Behind the Mask of Innocence, Kevin Brownlow wrote, “David Shepard, then with the American Film Institute’s archive program, had a list of 35mm nitrate prints held in a vault Paramount had forgotten it had. He asked me which title I would select, out of all of them, to look at right away. I said The City Gone Wild. He called Paramount to bring it out of the vaults for our collection that afternoon. The projectionist went to pick it up. ‘O, there was some powder on that,’ said the vault keeper ‘We threw it away.’ The film had been unspooled into a tank of water (recommended procedure for decomposing nitrate). Shepard complained officially to Paramount, who promised it would not happen again. He tried to rescue it, even from its watery grave, but a salvage company had carted it off by the time he got there.” In June of 2016, I spoke with David Shepard about the demise of the film. He confirmed this account, and  recalled grimly that Paramount would, at the time, discard any film which showed any degree of decomposition.

Under its American title, documented screenings of the film took place in Australia (including Tasmania), Canada,* China, Dutch Guiana (Suriname), Ireland, Jamaica, New Zealand, South Africa, Sweden, and the United Kingdom (including England, Isle of Man, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales). The film was occasionally shown in the United States as City Gone Wild (and at least once in Scotland under the title A City Gone Wild).

In the United States, the film was advertised under the title A Cidade que Enlouqueceu (Portuguese-language press).

Elsewhere, The City Gone Wild was shown under the title The City Gone Mad and La ciudad del mal (Argentina); Der Verbrecherkönig von Chicago (Austria); La cité maudite (Belgium); A cidade bulicosa (Brazil); La ciudad del mal (Chile); Mesto uplynulý divoký (Czechoslovakia); Storstadens svøbe! (Denmark); Het Kwaad eener Wereldstad (Dutch East Indies – Indonesia); La cité maudite and La Ville Maudite (France);  狂乱街 (Japan); Die Gottin der Sunde (Latvia); La onda del crimen (Mexico); Boeven en Burgers and Het Kwaad Eener Wereldstad (The Netherlands); Piraci Wielkiego Miasta (Poland); A Cidade Ruidosa (Portugal); Gonosztevok kiralya (Romania); La ciudad del mal (Spain); and La cité maudite (Switzerland).

* Except in Quebec, where the film was banned due to “too much shooting.”

The cast of The City Gone Wild is certainly an interesting one: it includes Thomas Meighan as John Phelan, Marietta Millner as Nada Winthrop, Louise Brooks as Snuggles Joy (Gunner Gallagher’s girlfriend), Fred Kohler as Gunner Gallagher, Duke Martin as Lefty Schroeder, Nancy Phillips as Lefty’s Girl, Wyndham Standing as Franklin Ames, Charles Hill Mailes as Luther Winthrop, King Zany as Bondsman, (renown boxer) Gunboat Smith as a Policeman, and Shirley Dorman in an uncredited role.


Interestingly believe-it-or-not, Meighan was Louise Brooks’ “uncle-in-law.” Meighan was married to Frances Ring, a Broadway stage actress and the sister of the popular entertainer Blanche Ring. Director Eddie Sutherland — Brooks’ husband at the time, was the nephew of both Meighan, as Sutherland’s mother, Julie, was a sister of Blanche and Frances Ring.

In the mid-1920s, Meighan became interested in Florida real estate after talking with his brother, who was a realtor. In 1925, Meighan bought property in Ocala, Florida (where scenes for the Eddie Sutherland-directed It’s the Old Army Game were shot). In 1927, he built a home in New Port Richey, Florida. It was there that he spent his winters and helped support a local movie theater, the Meighan Theatre, which was named in his honor. The Meighan Theatre opened July 1, 1926, with a showing of the Meighan movie The New Klondike, a film set against the backdrop of the Florida land boom of the 1920s. Today, the renamed Richey Suncoast Theater is home to the annual Thomas Meighan film festival.

Notably, Meighan was involved in two of the more sensational happenings of the silent film era. In 1916, he was the sole witness to Jack Pickford and Olive Thomas’ secretive wedding. And in 1923, Meighan put up a large chunk of the bail money, and with the help of June Mathis and George Melford, and got Rudolph Valentino out of jail after he was charged with bigamy.