One More Johnny Rocco, Hell, One More Pete Morgan, More Or Less Isn’t Worth Dying Over-With Edward G. Robinson’s “The Red House” (1947) In Mind-A Meta-Film Review  

By Bartlett Webber 

The Red House, starring Johnny Rocco, oops, ugly Edward G. Robinson, hot Julie London, and pretty boy Rory Calhoun, 1947

Nobody in all of Albany County cried one single tear when they heard that local farmer Pete Morgan had cashed his check, had gone down in the mud over his own hubris. And rightly so since nobody should cry any kind of tears even those crocodile ones over a guy who turned out to be a serial killer and many other things that will get an airing below. Naturally the story line on this guy cried out for a cinematic treatment and the film under review starring ugly as sin Edward G. Robinson The Red House was the result.

Before I say another word though let me say right now that Edward G Robinson, the famed 1930s gangster hero to millions of young kids, guys mostly, who knocked over more banks and armored trucks than you could believe possible was totally miscast as the early version of American psycho. As a holy goof as my friend Seth Garth who got the term from Jack Kerouac whom he met down in Miami in the late 1960s before his early death when Jack was living with his mother down there and drinking himself into a stupor trying to relieve that writers’ block he had keeping him recycling the same basic story line he had been using since his post-breakthrough Big Sur caused a stir about a decade before. Back to Edward G as a local yokel kill-crazy farmer in upstate New York though required a huge extension of the theory of the suspension of disbelief most films require. This was a long way from his role as the legendary gangster Johnny Rocco who caused one ex-soldier who had seen it all in the European Theater during World War II to throw up his hands and declare that the world would still survive with one more Johnny Rocco or one less.    

Yeah Johnny was a hard case, was made of hard stuff from the tough Division Streets of Chicago. Had worked his way up what Sam Lowell always and correctly has called the criminal enterprise food chain until he got to the top, no quarter give and no questions asked. Then the government lowered the boom on him, deported him since he was an illegal immigrant and that was the end of it. Wait a minute Johnny Rocco did rise to the top letting governments push him around anymore rival mobsters. Hell no, not Johnny Rocco, no way was he going to let some punk government crimp his style, so he blew the gaskets in Cuba basking in sunny Havana with guys like Meyer Lansky and Jimmy Rizzo doing his go-fer work back in the States. But in the end he was itching  to get stateside and make his big comeback. That is where that ex-soldier an average Joe named David made his remarks about why should he give a damn one way or another about the Johnny Roccos of the world. That would not stop a guy like David under certain conditions from taking a big swipe at Johnny and his fleet of gunsels when Johnny blew into Key Largo to make a deal that would start him back to being king of the hill on dry land.      

The condition that would move David, move that unmoored soldier-boy, messing with his woman, some good-looking frill named Laura, Lauren something like that after Johnny tried to mar her up after she slapped the bastard silly one night when he, Johnny, tried to get her under the silky sheets. A guy like Johnny though is hard on women, runs through then like water, had brought some old boozer torch-singer with him for company but ditched her in about two seconds flat when he eyed the young Laura. Laura though had some big brown eyes for this David despite his sour stance on Johnny and his fate. Not to worry a guy like Johnny will always want more and when Laura would not give him a tumble he balked, got nasty and that is when soldier boy got rum brave enough to take Johnny and his ungainly entourage on. Result; the last time we saw Johnny he was holding up the floorboard on a fishing boat heading back to sunny Havana having underestimated David’s valor when his hackles were up.

You can see now that Eddy G. was totally miscast as some country bumpkin farmer whose demented demeanor would haunt many a country girl, and did. Eddy was Johnny Rocco no question but this silly holy goof American country psycho gave the community, the profession, gave guys like Norman Bates a bad name. Pete probably is prime example number one why urbanization, getting people the hell off the isolated farms, was a historically beneficial trend. You know the story if you are a certain age, it was in all the newspapers back in the 1940s or maybe I should run it by you and you figure it out.    

Pete, variously called Peg-Leg Pete, Crippled-up Pete since he had a wooden leg as a result of some serious accident related to what happened to the poor bugger in the days when it was okay to say Peg-Leg and cripple and not disabled (or maybe now it is not okay to even say disabled letting able-ists flaunt their good fortune). Pete used to laugh about it said it gave him a certain cache until his ward, Meg, more on her in a minute, broke her leg and old Doc Barnes, an average country doctor, said it was okay for Pete to be a peg-leg but a girl, a woman needed two well-formed legs working to do whatever girls, women with well-formed legs do. (I asked Laura Perkins, the resident well-formed legs woman around her although Leslie Dumont and maybe even young Sarah Le Moyne might give her a run for her money if that needing both legs in good working order was true and she affirmed what old Doc Barnes said.).         

        

This Meg, a good-looking if coyly shy high school student was the ward, I guess he and his sister Ellen actually adopted here, of the Morgan household. The story was that Meg’s parents, a woman named Jenny and her husband Herb, had left Meg with Pete and Ellen to go start a farm down in the southern part of New York and had been killed in some undefined accident. Baloney, pure bull. That was Pete’s first action, the first step in what would become the Albany County Pete psycho legend. (I also asked Laura who grew up in upstate New York whether she had heard of the legend. When I asked she froze, froze solid saying that she remembered that her own parents refused to let her go into the woods that adjoined their farm for fear that some copycat killer was on the loose after Pete went down in the mud.)

Pete had been sweet on this Jenny, had wanted to marry her, offered her the steady life of a successful farmer, but she would not shake the deadbeat Herb. So Pete, in a rage, smothered her, he said by accident and if it had been a sole event well maybe but no that was a lot of crap. Killed Herb too and put their bodies down the old mill, the red house mill, okay. Ellen, in on the killings as an after the fact accomplice covered Pete’s ass for years. This Ellen seemed according to Laura whose own religious upbringing was basically Brethren of the Common Life, Anabaptists, from the Second Great Awakening that burned over upstate New York in the early 1800s to be Primitive Baptist meaning she believed that all was forgiven come End Times, everybody was saved so Pete had not really sinned, sinned against God anyway and that justified whatever actions she took for she would be saved too. (Laura said the Primitives had a pecking order even though everybody would be saved come judgment day with the righteous saved a couple of minutes ahead of guys like Pete. Laura’s own upbringing was that nobody was saved who had not done anything but pray their asses off al their lives.)       

This is where things get confusing, not for Pete but for Meg. There was a real question about whether Pete or that Herb was Meg’s real father it could have gone either way, but my take was that Pete was firing blanks which caused his rages and his longtime reign of terror. When Pete, peg-leg slowing him down as he aged, hired a young guy Ned who was a classmate of Meg’s things started going awry. This Ned, not a wise guy but kind of a chump around women, girls, had a girlfriend named Julie, a looker, but somebody who was leading him around by the nose (and fooling around with every guy who made a pass at her which was every guy). Meg wanted to be the one leading him by that nose. That idea, the mere idea of it drove Pete crazy since, well we might as well face it although the word never showed up in the film, had incestuous feelings for young Meg, started seeing in her that thwarted love of Jenny and her whorish ways. Pete hired this young guy, this high school dropout, Rory to harass Ned, to get him out of Meg’s system. This Rory was rumored to be Pete’s son but from the photographs that the DA’s office released after all was over he looked more like Herb’s son. Adding fuel to my contention that Pete, my man Peg-Leg was firing blanks.       

Pete went so crazy that he ordered this Rory who was hustling Ned’s girlfriend Julie right under Ned’s nose to shoot near Ned to scare him. Unfortunately, Rory wound up shooting and mortally wounding Ellen who was going to the Red House, don’t forget the red house with the red mill although this film was strictly black and white, to burn the damn thing down. With good reason. Everything was crowding in on Peg-Leg once Ned and then Meg started to realize what an American psycho Pete really was. Ellen was just trying to cover up the many murders over the years which Pete had committed when he got in a rage, got to thinking about why that damn Jenny didn’t take up with him and leave Herb. Strangely all the girls that Pete entrapped (and it got very weird because Ellen who kept a diary which later was made public was the one who would lure the girls to the woods, to that goddam red house) looked almost exactly like this Jenny, looked like Meg who looked like Jenny. Weird stuff but Pete did the county, hell, the state a favor by finally realizing that the gig was up, that he would never make Meg his wife or concubine and that the kill crazy bastard would not stop until somebody or something stopped him. He went down in the red barn mill without a whimper. Johnny Rocco would rather do a million years in stir than go down in that ooze Pete let himself fall down in and that ain’t no lie. That was the real Eddy G role.          

See why though nobody cried tear number one when old Peg-Leg cashed his check, caught the westbound freight.