I watched so much TCM on HBO that I found two old movies, Private Detective 62 and Nobody Lives Forever, that had the same plot: guys start out to scam women out of money and end up falling in love. What’s up with that? And then I set my audio essay to visuals from yet a third movie about a scammer, the public domain movie Foolish Wives. Click the video to listen and watch our edit of Foolish Wives, or scroll down to read the transcript. You know the drill.

I’ve been sick for a week, and somehow I watched so much TCM on HBO that I ended up with two movies, a double feature of movies about romance scammers in the golden era of Hollywood. And I had to talk about how both of these movies worked out in the economic and, well, military things that were going on in their time periods. One was from like 1945, the other from 1933, so that seems like close together because it’s basically a decade apart, but very different things were going on in America.

The first one I watched, it’s because I have a thing about John Garfield, was Nobody Lives Forever, and he plays this guy named Nick that was in the Army. And he seems like a nice guy, except that before he went in the Army, he was a con man, and he had given his girlfriend $50,000 to hold on to for him. And when he gets back, she’s lost it all investing in a nightclub, and so he, I guess, threatens her and gets the money back and runs off to California with his right-hand man, who is played by Mr. Kravitz from Bewitched. That’s the main person I recognized from any of this.

And immediately, there’s a sleazy guy named Doc, and he’s this sort of nonspecific sleazy European, even though the actor was from Manchester, England. They have him sounding like maybe he’s French, or maybe he’s German. I think he’s supposed to represent fascism, but he’s also an incel, and he hates Nick, John Garfield’s character, because Nick is good at schmoozing women and getting money out of them. And Doc thinks that the women should go for him because he knows about European brandy and has an accent.

Now, the way this all ties together is, like I said, Nick just got back from fighting in World War II, where he basically became a good guy, and he’s kind of lost his taste for conning people. Somehow, they know what’s in the bank account of this widow named Gladys, who is—you think a widow, you think some old schoolteacher or something?

But she’s a young, good-looking woman named Gladys, and they want to con her out of $2 million. But Nick accidentally falls in love with her, helped along by going to the Spanish mission. The swallows come back to Capistrano, Spanish mission, and you can tell from, like, 1940s insinuation that something physical went on between Nick and Gladys there, maybe up against the wall of the outside of the mission, because she’s got it bad for him when they get back, and he just wants the deal to be off because he’s realized that he’s a good person.

They hear a choir inside the mission, and I had joked to my husband that what he hears is like “The Devil Went Down to Georgia,” because he’s a bad person. But no, I think he’s a good person. But I think, and I don’t know if this was intentional, it’s probably just in the parlance of their times, that going to war changed him, and he came back a better person.

But Doc is not so quick to end the con, and so everything ends in gunplay, and, like, a good character losing their life. So it’s basically, you know, like G.I. Joe still fighting fascists on the home front, and I didn’t know that romance scamming was such a time-honored tradition.

I mean, I knew there were sugar mamas, but this is—it’s not like, you know, some guy sending you a picture of Brad Pitt and then you send him 200 grand. This was way more elaborate and involved, like, a lot of going out to dinner.

So, backing up to the William Powell film, Detective 62, 1933, he is some kind of agent, like for the State Department, and he’s trying to steal documents in France, but obviously this would be some kind of patriotic enterprise. Only he gets caught and his passport is canceled, and he’s a man without a country. And they put him on a boat to go back to America, but then right before he gets to America, they get a cable, a telegram, or whatever. I don’t know how they would have said it, a messenger pigeon, that says, “Take his ass back to France,” so he jumps off the boat headfirst, which is pretty impressive. This stuntman pops up that looks nothing like William Powell.

And the first thing he finds when he swims ashore is this con man and his secretary who are catching some people at it and taking pictures to give to the woman’s husband. And he thinks so quickly, he gets the people out of it by pretending he’s there to borrow someone’s coat or something. Or, I didn’t understand the 30s sometimes. It loses me with all the fast-talking, and even more insinuation than the 40s, even though this was pre-Code, so it should have been more understandable for a degenerate person of the 21st century like me. But anyway, it’s the Depression, and so he’s lost his job.

And the only thing that he can find to do is to go work for this private detective that he’s just disgraced. But the detective works for mobsters, and what they do, and this is horrifying to me, you know, they’re not just finding women to get their money from. They’re somehow taking, I guess, gigolos and tricking women who are separated but not divorced yet into getting into compromising positions with these gigolos and getting pictures, and it causes the women to lose their kids in custody battles. And, like, this is their business.

So Powell, he’s just supposed to romance this one woman, and I’m sorry, Janet—I’m bad with names. Her name is Janet, dammit. And Janet’s only problem is that she’s too good at roulette, which I didn’t think that you could do, but she’s rich and globe-trotting herself. And so there’s these people who are caught up in desperation by the Depression, having to do a terrible job.

And they’re trying to trick this woman who is one of the 1%, and this casino owes her 45 grand and they won’t pay her. And so again, guns come into play, and William Powell’s character, Donald, is in love with Janet. And this lazy guy Tony, you know, he’s not going to give up, and he’s got to get taken out.

So we’ve gone from post-war to pre-war, where these people are dealing with the Depression. The people in the John Garfield movie, we’re dealing with PTSD, PTSD depression. You know, I just accidentally watched them back-to-back and then realized that I had a double feature, which I thought was very interesting, that that subject tended to come up pretty often.

Actually, when I was watching the John Garfield movie, I thought, you know, this would have been a pretty good Humphrey Bogart movie, but not as good as John Garfield. I feel like John Garfield was more able to make himself vulnerable, which was what was needed for the part. But it turned out that it was supposed to be a Humphrey Bogart movie, but he got mischeduled and had to make, I don’t know, The Big Sleep or something instead of making Nobody Lives Forever.

But then he had another movie, and the name of it escapes me, that I also watched in the last week, with Elizabeth Scott, where he comes back from World War II and has got to solve a mystery and has to go after this woman and trick her into helping him figure out what had happened to his friend.

So a lot of tricking of women going on in these old movies, a lot of, I don’t know, a power imbalance. They didn’t like women that had money or status.

We got the nonspecific European guy coming after the soldier that’s had a change of heart, and gangsters vs. the State Department, and I guess that’s where I’ll end it. Have you seen these movies? And do you think that they make a good pair? The first two, forget the Bogart movie I couldn’t remember the name of, but you probably would like that too because everybody likes Bogey.

And I hope I don’t sound too bad. I’m finally starting to feel better, so I will be back with you next week.

Probably with a—what did I say that I was doing? Oh, I was gonna do some movies about people being dead the whole time, like ghost stories where the people don’t realize they’re dead. I’m gonna do a little series on that if I can get my head out of the TCM vault, so look forward to that, and have a good night!