Noirvember 2019 – “Johnny Apollo” (1940)

Today’s film features none other than Tyrone Power, a star I have complicated feelings about but that’s a story for another day.

Power plays the son of a stockbroker jailed for embezzlement. Because of this disgrace, Tyrone can’t find a job anywhere – his name is essentially tainted. So, naturally, he changes it – to Johnny Apollo (hey! That’s the name of the movie!). But the job he gets is not that of a store clerk or a bank teller, no. He turns to the life of crime, and he is going to buy a pardon for his father. As fate would have it, his employer is a gangster sentenced to jail on the same day as Tyrone’s father, only he has already been granted parole…

And obviously it all has to be complicated even further when the gangster’s girlfriend and Power start developing feelings for each other…

This might not be your traditional noir (again! What is going on with my film selection this year!), it’s only 1940 after all, but it does feature my favourite noir trope – a nightclub and a nightclub singer (Dorothy Lamour, the gangster’s girlfriend, later Tyrone Power’s girlfriend). What it does not feature is, oddly enough, crime. Almost all of the horrific things Tyrone and his new gangster buddies allegedly do happen off-screen.

For the second film in a row we’re getting good cinematography. I wouldn’t say it’s quite on The Wrong Man level but especially the actors themselves look beautiful here. I enjoyed most of the cast… except probably Tyrone Power himself. He didn’t necessarily bother me but I do not think he is convincing enough as a fresh-faced college boy thrown into the „real world” – and he is definitely not a gangster either.

I suppose that Johnny Apollo’s main goal is to show how people, even good people, might be pushed into desperate measures but I don’t quite believe it manages to do that. What I got is a pleasant enough story of rich people making bad decisions. And I have enough of that in the real world already.