"Forgotten Men with Steam" (Pre-Code Capsules): GOODBYE AGAIN, ARSENE LUPIN, HE WAS HER MAN, THE BOWERY, HELL'S ANGELS

HELL'S ANGELS

1930 - dir. Howard Hughes (w/ James Whale, Edmund Goulding - uncredited)

***1/2

Hughes' infamously expensive Hemingway-wannabe saga of WWI pilots and the woman holds up today as fresher and more cutting edge than say, Scorsese's The Aviator. Its only drawback is the ill-conceived casting of the Yank brothers who come to Oxford for the learnin' and stay to become pilots during the Great War: Monte (Ben Lyon) is the cowardly, jaded womanizer; Roy (James Hall--a bloated mix of Richard Barthelmess and Bob Newhart) is brave but a chump who idolizes women to the extent of idiocy. He expects nymphomaniac Jean Harlow (in the role that made her an instant iconic sex symbol) to live up to his goofy moralistic ideals because she kissed him once! If you're a pretty girl who gets around (if you know what I mean), you've probably had more than one dude like Roy moping you, leaving emails or messages constantly, getting ever more sullen as to why you haven't called him back. "Never love a woman," Monte tries to tell Roy, "just make love to her."

It's a great line, but the question is, who was the girl, Howard, who left you with such a high opinion of women? She must have been quite a gal...

While unconvincing as a ladykiller, at least Lyon does a decent job with his scenes of his being seduced against his very weak will by Harlow who--with her thick, jet-black eyebrows giving her platinum wave just the right level of dirty contrast to her platinum wave--almost steals the movie from the spectacular aerial combat. It's for her and the fighting we're here, not the dimwit brothers, so every scene of these two sibling muttonheads engaged in their worldly nonsense seems worthless unless Harlow is there, coming between them.

The thing about Hughes is: he at least walks it likes he talks it; there's a cool sense of uninhibited sexual congress with Harlow, as expressed keenly in one of the best all-time 'fade-outs' in the pre-code era. It's a scene of her and Monte making out on a couch, crossed over to a scene of naive brother Roy sulking back at the bunks (having been blown off by her on his imagined date); when we get back to the couch at Harlow's pad, the vibe has shifted from simmering hot to ice cold. Monte's ashen mood and Harlow's nonplussed attitude ("It seems colder in here now," she says, "doesn't it?") indicates they had sex on the couch during the fade-out and (my guess) it wasn't very satisfying. Monte now hates himself, and--in grand womanizer misogynist fashion--thinks she's a slut for putting out. He lacks the self-awareness to realize his post-orgasm depression is not her fault, but his, and nature's. Yo Monte! Every true playa knows not to get all pissy and moralistic with the girl you were busting moves on 'before' shit got real, even if now all you can think about is getting home before your wife (or idiot brother) finds out.

I admit I've never been a huge fan of Harlow's work in later movies, where she often seems a bit shrill and broad, especially playing alleged society dames. But the Harlow on display here is like a whole different person than the one shortly to rule over at MGM. She's not a baby-talking brawler lounging around eating bonbons and babbling to her maid or shoving around Wallace Beery; she's an educated, upscale nymphomaniac, whose love of sex is like a fierce elemental magic. She's thinner too, and younger than she'd look in just another year or so, and you can feel the hair on her arms tingling with a every carnal inhale. She's like a living electric sheet of fire. She's not perfect, just dazzling.

(Compare to how kind of busted she looks just a year later in Public Enemy, below).

Second big bang for the buck here the aerial combat; all the sounds of all the guns and the humming of the biplane engines as they go buzzing about is of course post-synced (Hughes took so long filming Hell's Angels it was started in the silent era) and the engine buzz is strangely soothing; also, having an aviator doing the filming and choreography definitely hels; we get a clear picture of where all the planes are in relation to each other, the ground, and the cloud layers; and most of the dialogue is in German in these scenes, so the inter-titles make a weird kind of sense, especially in a very long and riveting scene involving a German zeppelin attempting to drop bombs on Piccadilly Circus on a cloudy London night. The trick for zeppelins (this being the era before both radar and twin engine planes) was staying high above the clouds up where the air is too thin for single engine biplanes. With no bombsights invented yet (and no black-outs), they lower the bombardier down through the clouds on a cable; and for some unexplained noble reason, the bombardier steers the bombs into the water, knowing full well the British planes will strafe him anyway. The mix of luck, patience, not freaking out or choking on the trigger, and just how damn slow those planes were compared to today, all come roaring to life. Hughes went all out for this stuff, especially with hand-painted color tints.

And as the German who first duels with Monte (before the war) and then later questions the boys after they're shot down behind enemy lines, Lucien Prival is a delight. A leaner, feral version of Erich Von Stroheim, he steals the final (alas, landlocked) chapter of the film. Don't forget the Germans weren't yet Nazis and it's clear Hughes doesn't see them as faceless ogres; there was still a lot of chivalrous, sporting blood between Huns and Brits, especially with the upper crust aviators. They'd all been drinking, playing and dueling together at each other's colleges scant years before. Of all the male characters in this filthy war, it's actually Prival who seems worth the couch of Harlow.

But man, those chumps from Oxford...

GOODBYE AGAIN

1933 - dir. Michael Curtiz

***

Warren William is at his most frivolous in this Warner Brothers comedy, maybe even too much so, and I say this as a die-hard William fan. I even like Satan Met a Lady, that original Maltese Falcon adaptation where he hams it up so much he seems merrily cockeyed, a bit blitzed, not quite blotto or stinko, but buzzing. Here, as a bestselling romantic novel writer, he's even buzzier, but he has a weird cool chemistry with Joan Blondell as his (what else?) fitfully bemused secretary so we know we're safely ensconced in primo WB pre-code territory, in short, the wolf is in his tailored forest. Adding to the value: Helen Chandler is the unwelcome sister-in-law of his latest on-tour groupie/conquest (Genevieve Tobin), showing up to make sure she comes home, for the sanctity of marriage and reputationzzzz. In reality, Chandler was a notorious alcoholic who burnt herself up in a fire shortly hereafter, a fitting if tragic fate for a girl half in half out of this world (as in 1931's The Last Flight and Dracula). Wallace Ford--bespectacled!-- is cast against type as Chandler's litigious husband and fellow moral task force self-appointer. Dragging Tobin's estranged but relatively cool husband (Hugh Herbert) in tow, they set about following William from Cleveland to Albany on the sleeper train, hoping to nab him in the act. And there's a great scene where their presence in the next car all but forces William to sleep with Tobin, waiting in his sleeper in a sexy negligee. Pre-code gold! It all ends in William's Albany boudoir where he jumps around on the bed and generally carries on while Blondell is gradually revealed to be far more than a secretary but hitherto 'open-minded' to his dalliances with ladies such as Tobin - usually, but because Tobin's married and he's lying to her about it, she gets pissed. Is he gonna do the right thing? Are we kids or what?

That's about it --not much to write home about though the actors sure strive for a farcical peak. It doesn't come, that peak, but William is on camera every minute, almost, so it's tough to care about anything else, even though we realize that he needs more menace to be really riveting. Here he's coasting on his wolfish charm like he knows we'll love him no matter what. We will. Gotta love a confident man.

HE WAS HER MAN

1934 - dir. Lloyd Bacon

**1/2

Jimmy Cagney and Joan Blondell play two small time grifters in this half-good WB drama. Hustling and flowing from the Turkish baths of NYC to the running afoul of mobsters in Chicago to hiding out on the shores of Marina Del Rey, seeking safe harbor in a small Portuguese immigrant fishing community, the kind of Podunk town that showgirls and good-hearted Steinbeckian whores go for their second chances, turning respectable to marry some terminally decent, slow-witted townie (see also: Tiger Shark, Anna Christie, The Wedding Night, The Purchase Price, The Wind, to name merely a few) whose lunkheadedness is almost like one last dig at the sanctity of, as Blondell's heart-of-gold whore puts it, "good honest decent hardworking people, which you wouldn't know anything about, Dick Jordan!"

Believe it or not, the big surprise here is Victor Jory as the chump. With his deep voice, looming height, the stoic poise of a stock company Sitting Bull, and gravitas that belies his then-lean years, he might have a bizarre accent and mangled fisherman syntax, and Cagney might talk faster and hustle more but Jory's tortoise wins the race, legitimately, and we don't roll our eyes. While such a result certainly pleased the censors (then looming ever closer), the film's subtext never sides with the forces of small town decency: the sanctity of marriage may prevail, but as Cagney walks off into the sunset, arm-in-arm with his killers, it's him we want to follow, even if that means going straight off a cliff.

THE BOWERY

1933 dir. Michael Curtiz

***1/2

Robust Raoul Walsh direction makes this turn-of-the-century New York City Darryl F. Zanuck opus the Gangs of New York to beat, with all the downtown warring fire brigades, Tammany Hall corruption, nickel beer, sawdust floozies singing from laughing laps, tear-stained blubbering pathos, callous racism, and freewheeling stunts the era can offer, and of it rendered in a mise-en-scène so vivid you can smell the cigars, cheap beer, and coal fires.

Wallace Beery stars as Chuck, the--what else?--big shot of the Bowery; Jackie Cooper is his adopted son, a racist orphan who likes throwing rocks through "chink's winders" (we're invited to nervously laugh as the brigades slug it out during a laundry fire, leaving the Chinese stuck on the fourth floor, burning alive); Fay Wray is the good girl who ends up keeping house for the pair of them, much to Jackie's initial resentment; George Raft is Chuck's rival, an up-and-coming sharpie with a saloon and fire brigade of his own. Chuck don't like that much, and he's so tough he saps a broad just because she drunkenly crashes into his table, as illustration to Cooper that women are "only after yer spondoolicks." Cooper's hip to that, doesn't like girls, and instead goes in for trading cigarette cards "from guinea kids." Yeesh! Cooper's presence on the scene is somewhat superfluous, it seems thanks to the popularity of THE CHAMP, he's become affixed to Beery like some kind of blubbering lamprey.

The problem with the whole motivation of Leo DiCaprio in the very similar GANGS OF NEW YORK was his swearing revenge on a man who his father lost a fight to fairly. There's no treachery involved, no injustice. (No sense in tracking down the enemy soldier who killed your father in WW2, after all - it's not personal, Sonny). It shows the extreme cluelessness that can result when a genius like Scorsese's every dumb idea is never doubted as genius. Well, alas, even The Bowery feels the need to fall back on a similar hackneyed arc of its day, for as popular as vengeance for dead family members is today, in the 30s it was the 'love triangle', usually a woman choosing between a young man with no dough and an older successful but unsavory character. Thus, here a triangel coheres from the crowded streets betwixt Wray, the jealous brute Beery and George Raft as his slick rival--yawn. A better plot thread has Raft jumping off the Brooklyn bridge on a wager for Chuck's saloon; he makes it but almost used a dummy in his place, so reversals of fortune are always happening on the Bowery, including an appearance of vile liquor-bashing Carrie Nation and her armada of shrewish wives. Living examples of the evils of sobriety, for a country finally free of the evils of prohibition (it was repealed in 1933 - the same year of THE BOWERY's release), the drunkenness flying in the face of their dour battle-axe waving scans a genuinely patriotic.

ARSENE LUPIN

1931 - *** - dir. Jack Conway

Karen Morley is at her warmest and most mature in this pre-code MGM caper: The romance between her and master thief John Barrymore starts with his discovering her naked in his bed during a party (he insists on being in the room while she dresses - with the lights off - and it's pretty sexy... for he is no gentleman!). And since this is Paris, he doesn't have to go to the gallows to spare her from having to confess she spent the night with him when a crime is announced the next morning. He doesn't believe her story about being an exiled Russian countess, but he still likes her. So do we. Theirs is a relationship of mature equals and that's a rarity even in pre-code, or screwball for that matter. I'm not a huge fan of John's brother Lionel, who here plays the head of the French Secret Service, sworn to bag Lupin before he retires. As always, Lionel is as fussy and mannered, and dawdling as John is sweeping and debonair, but the pair have a more interesting rapport here than in all their other films together. Enticing dabs of old dark house mystery atmosphere help it stay fun, with great Cedric Gibbons art direction prodding the events ever forward.

Even if, by the end, not too much is really at stake (the French and Italians love their master thief narratives more than Americans, who don't always see the point) and it all kind of resembles the later THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR (i.e. no deaths), right down the daylight hour museum theft, so what? Lipin was here first. And despite its rough treatment, the Mona Lisa is none the worse for wear having been ripped off it's canvas stretcher, rolled up and concealed inside an umbrella jacket. In fact, the only real crime here is Karen Morley's not being in more films or better known. Appearing only sporadically after she left MGM (due to disputes over her private life, and later the blacklist) we have but a handful of films with which to treasure her mature sexual openness and the way she more than made up for actorly limitations with unusual line readings, effortless charm and an icy laugh. So there's this film, PHANTOM OF CRESTWOOD, SCARFACE, MASK OF FU MANCHU, DINNER AT EIGHT and, well, they'd all be worthwhile anyway, but with her... they're all sublime. She's got such mature allure in LUPIN she melted the keys in my pocket. We wouldn't see sexual confidence like hers again until... well, Renee Russo in the THOMAS CROWN remake. Like the Mona Lisa, cherish her always.

Early Hawks: THE CRIMINAL CODE, TIGER SHARK, CEILING ZERO, BARBARY COAST, ROAD TO GLORY

Much as I love Orson Welles, I've never quite forgiven him for the Cahiers du Cinema interview when he was asked to name the three greatest American directors and answered "John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford." How dare he exclude our greatest director, Howard Hawks? Ford was brilliant visually and mythologically but easily mired in his misty-eyed Irish sentiment. He wasn't American -- he was "Irish-American."  Hawks is 'all-American' --he is what makes America great: knowing the difference between being brave in the face of death and just being an imperialist swine. It makes sense I guess for Welles to prefer Ford since Welles is first and foremost a visual director - packing his screen with baroque detail and anchoring it all with his one-of-a-kind voice and genius. Camaraderie and face-of-danger bonding mean nothing to a one-man show like Welles, who inevitably makes himself the center of attention at any restaurant communal table.  What Hawksian men do instead is to sing and play music together (rather than just listening to a sudden walk-on by the Sons of the Pioneers or forcing Susan to sing opera). In Hawks, if a Hawksian man meets a woman it's ten times faster and more disorienting than a Maginot line charge. There's no chaperone, no beaming parson; the Hawksian man has to face that woman alone, and no amount of inner death-defying can prepare him for her forward advance. The whole fabric of the John Ford fort, the small town unity that extends in generations for centuries back, is sublimely pared down by Hawks to a gummy old cripple, a drunk, and a limping sheriff, holed up in a jail and visited daily with soap and beers in baskets by attractive women, who seem more inviting than even any legion of ballbusting Maureen O'Haras). There's no mutually consenting premarital sex in a Ford film, and no other kind in a Hawks. There are no stern moral matrons, no kids (unless they're froggy-voiced old men in kid bodies, like in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes).

Needless to say, John Ford John Ford John Ford has won the history, the legend's been printed; he's got dozens of boxed sets in his name. Hawks has none (aside from R2 where he has one OOP three movie set), and part of that may be that Hawks films are still very modern and unique in and of themselves, spanning all genres and types. There are very few misses in his canon but also nothing of bourgeois importance like GRAPES OF WRATH. The closest Hawks gets is maybe his most unHawkslike film, the Fordian SGT. YORK. Usually, instead of emotion, social issues, and historical accuracy, Hawks' films are fun, archetypal, witty, engaging, resonant in a way that makes rewatching them a delight time and again. It's as if Hawks films take place in the universe that Ford has set up--the same towns and valleys-- but then the Hawks characters are never seen in Ford's films because they hide out from all the boring town functions (they don't go to church or square dances).

In the 30s, though, Hawks was still figuring himself out (comedies aside). He had some great writers, many of whom, like William Faulkner, had served with him in the Flying Escadrille (so, too, knew the existential trauma of "hurrah for the next man who dies" toast) or gone hunting with him, fishing or racing, but Hawks had yet to find his signature action movie style, the male bonding-in-isolation mode, so he did all sorts of studio jobs, from costume dramas to prison films, war pictures (World War I that is) to racing films. He had found success in Hecht-scripted screwball farces like Scarface and Twentieth Century but the real great action films were yet to come.

Anyway, maybe examining these five early, more obscure, films (in order of release) will help. They're all hard to find, so I mention how to locate each film, be it available only on VHS, DVD-R, or TCM--which is a crime considering nearly every John Ford movie ever made is remastered and available in many editions--and my own ratings.

I'm presuming too, by the way, you're coming to these films having run through all your other Hawksian choices for the -nth time, as one does and are craving more like a junky craves a fix.

 To what extent these will satisfy is of course the issue each of us must answer.

THE CRIMINAL CODE (1931)

Avail. on VHS and Region 2 DVD

**1/2

Walter Huston is a tough but fair DA who sends a naive kid (Phillip Holmes) up the river for ten years on a manslaughter charge (the kid whacked a masher with a bottle in a notorious speakeasy, and the masher died). It's a bad break, but as Huston tersely snaps, "an eye for an eye - that's the foundation of the criminal code!" Waving a black book like a blackjack, Huston has to come to terms (once he becomes warden) with a whole different criminal code when he becomes a prison warden at the prison where the kid is sent. You don't rat out your fellow inmates, no matter what, that's the prison code, "an eye for an eye". This code makes it hard to punish in-house murders. Guess who saw one but can't rat out the killer, even if it means he'll walk free? That's right! If once-sweet kid Holmes rats out the killer of a previous criminal code violator (i.e. turns 'squealer' as to who killed the last squealer) he'll walk out a free man. 

But Holmes won't break the code! He won't! He won't he won't! he won't!hewont!hewonthewont! Huston gets in some intense acting, grabbing the boy by the lapels and demanding to know who did it. WHO DID IT!?? He won't!hewont!hewonthewont --that kind of slow build-up to an impassioned tough sustain is the Huston Sr. specialty. But what else does this early sound Hawks offer that's well, Hawksian?

Well, in shades of His Girl Friday to come, there's some nice overlapping dialogue in a press room, and Huston gets some chances to be super tough, like walking unarmed into a throng of hateful prisoners, or getting a shave from a lifer who cut another man's throat.  Karloff gets to loom like a white tunic-sporting Frankenstein in the climax as he stalks a squealer through the warden's offices, but otherwise these characters are all little more than stock types trapped in a polemic contrived to demonstrate Big Moral Issues. There's not much room for Hawksian heroics in such a clamped-down situation (like if the whole of RIO BRAVO was told from the point of view of the imprisoned Joe Burdett). You can see a clip from Criminal Code by the way in TARGETS (discussed here). It's the film my fellow Hawks devotee Peter Bogdanovich and a barely-fictionalized Karloff (playing a horror actor named Orlok) watch on TV while throwing back drinks in Karloff's hotel suite, whatever that's worth to you.

TIGER SHARK (1932)

Occasional TCM airings, Warner Archive DVD

**1/2

Disturbing documentary-style scenes of tuna fishing off the coast of Steinbeckian Northern California: a crew of 20 or more fishermen on a big vessel in the thick of the schools pull them up one at a time on lines and sling them into a narrow trough running the length of the boat, thousands of them piled alive atop each other, flipping and wiggling and cutting each other up, gasping for air, slicing with their razor fins, an angry, terrified, gasping blur of shaking fins and flapping tails. It's an ugly reality the men on the boat are blind to from experience. When one man fishes for himself or his family, it's the natural order; when a crew 'harvests' this many tuna at once, it's death-out-of-balance.

Luckily for my conscience, man's not the ocean's sole apex predator, because where there's panicked fish, there's tiger sharks, and they love the spicy tang of a Portuguese-a commercial fisherman's appendage-a. It's hard to feel sympathy, therefore, when Edward G. Robinson's initially-jovial sea captan loses his hand to a shark. For the rest of the film he sports a shiny hook (he gets it polished for his wedding day). Another guy loses his legs and dies, leaving his only daughter (Zita Johann) behind. Broke and powerless against Eddie G's boastful charms, it's her who has to stand hand-in-hook before the altar. Marred further by Robinson's headache-inducing accent (though I'm not sure I'd recognize a Portuguese accent from a Greek, Spanish or Brazilian, I doubt Eddie would, either), stereotypically trite local color, they even shoehorned the 'young buck-steals-love-of-young-wife-from-older cripple husband' onto the 1930 Barrymore-starring MOBY DICK! What a world.

Them ain't the only problems with TIGER SHARK: Zita Johann's ghostly alien pallor worked in THE MUMMY where she was supposed to be hypnotized most of the time, but here it works against her. She doesn't have the inner fortitude of, say, Greta Garbo's Anna Christie. Here Johann seems like she's perennially seasick, even on land. And so when she falls for Eddie's partner (two-handed hunk Richard Arlen), there's perhaps the forlorn hope that he might have access to some benzos that would make the overacting of Robinson bearable. Wrote Andrew Sarris, "Hawks remorselessly applies the laws of nature to sex. The man who is flawed by age, mutilation, or unpleasing appearance to even the slightest degree invariably loses the woman to his flawless rival." Yeah, but really it's the promise of benzos, and no fear of getting slashed in the face if he comes home a-drunk and in a short guy jealous rage. There's some good scenes all in all, but Robinson seems miscast. His constant chatter and Portuguese accent seem unduly weak for such a great actor. When he shoots at sharks from the safety of the crow's nest it only makes a sensitive viewer sick. When the illicit couple are making out below decks and the gun firing off camera suddenly stops--there's the film's sole moment of actual foreboding, a 'whoa!' here he comes, armed. How often does a cease fire signal the start of real danger? Only in a Hawks. 
 

CEILING ZERO (1936)

VHS

***1/2

A chronicle of the early days of the Newark airport airline dispatch/ traffic control room, wherein stray pilots are nursed through heavy fogs by tense ghost-voiced radio operators onto the 'beam,' and ex-WWI-ace turned chief-of-the-skies Pat O'Brien deals with overlapping crises while old friends and a snoopy aviation bureau rep (Barton MacLane) drop by interfere and/or say hello. We come to admire the way O'Brien can refrain from snapping people's heads off when--while engaged in life-or-death radio contact with some fog-bound lost plane--some oblivious person walks into the office from the terminal with a breezy joke and a pat on the back. Enter (tumbling) James Cagney as Dizzy, the clownish daredevil who's been O'Brien's pal since the Signal Corp but whose hot dog behavior doesn't fit the bureaucratic paradigms of post-war commercial aviation. Maybe you've already guessed the ending? Shhh.

Naval aviation pioneer Spig Weed wrote it and it's clear the usual Hawksian scribes of later years, Jules Furthman or Leigh Brackett, didn't. There's some distinctly un-Hawksian cockblocking, and--from Cagney's daredevil Dizzy, too much smug womanizing and other sleazy gigolo machinations, as he makes a big play for student pilot June Travis, even though she's engaged to a clean cut sap working on a wing de-icer.  If it wasn't Cagney playing him, maybe the ambivalence with which, in today's enlightened clime, we regard this boorish behavior might be easier to contextualize. It's confusing as it is, since he's neither a good nor bad guy, nor even complex. And it works, June goes for him! Why? Cagney's punchy but not nearly as sexy as he thinks he is. Cary Grant he ain't. And the overall result of his showboating is quite tiresome, almost from his first scene on. It undermines the 'men in a group' thing (imagine if Dean Martin was hitting on Feathers and cockblocking Chance anyway he could in Rio Bravo). Most of the time in those WB Cagney-O'Brien team-ups, it's Cagney who comes off best, but here it's O'Brien who turns in the surprisingly nuanced tour de force and Cagney who's stuck on 'type'.

Plusses include the compressed two-day time frame, the way Hawks knows how to break up the mostly interior action with dangerous seen-through-the-window effects like a streak of blazing gasoline outside the office window on the tarmac; and tough scenes like when they're all gathered around the radio, trying to help a lost pilot (Stu Erwin) after his honing beam goes out, and he can't get their radio signal at all but they can his progressively more panicked angry shouting, presuming everyone on the ground is off shooting craps or something, and there's nothing the frantic control room can do but keep trying. One girl listening in the room cries "Why don't you do something?" and they all bark at once "SHADDUP!!!!" Awesome. There's also some surprising sexual frankness: Travis offers herself to Cagney for sexual succor after the death of a pilot who took the doomed flight so Cagney could have a date with her -- a shadowy prefiguring of the steak factoring into Joe's death in Hawks's far better ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS two years later. It's a weird move on her part, considering her engagement, et al, and--knowing it's coming from the pen of a career Navy man like Spig--kinda sleazy. Her willingness to two-time a nice respectable boy (the fella who played Maureen O'Sullivan's fiancee Tommy in THE THIN MAN) with this demonic mustachioed leprechaun (Cagney comes off like the sleazy guy who helps Maureen O'Sullivan almost take that first wrong step who Tommy knocks out in that film's climactic dinner) smacks of something Hawks deftly eschewed in better films, sexism. Here it's even the worst kind, the career sailor sort where even respectable women are prostitutes deep down and no really means yes, so the only way to get a navy man to leave you alone is to stop fighting him off. 

BARBARY COAST (1935)

(DVD)

**

Miriam Hopkins plays one of the first white women to enter San Francisco, back in the 19th century gold rush boomtown days. This being pre-Panama Canal, a ship coming west from NY had to travel all the way around South America, and it took the better part of a year. Full of high hopes, anxious to disembark after so much time trapped at sea, newcomers would arrive to find a city of unpaved mud roads so nasty they could suck a whole pedestrian under like quicksand. The air between rickety shacks a dense pickpocket-filled fog, and inside the bigger buildings nothing but crooked roulette wheels, overdressed deft-fingered floozies, murderous bouncers, shanghai tunnel trap doors, and, behind it all, that pint-sized unlucky-in-love big shot Eddie G. Robinson, once more controlling the works. Naturally Miriam ends up working for him, as a roulette operator, the honey in the trap, and--inevitably--as somewhat more. Boy you'd think poor Eddie would learn by now to leave the tall white women be. If you're insecure about your height don't parade your pretty, taller woman around like trophies. Tall handsome idiots are everywhere!

There's a few elements that let you know Hawks isn't fully allowed to be himself here. This being one of the films he made as a hired gun of Sam Goldwyn, he's clearly not particularly enamored with his romantic lead, Joel McCrea, playing a foolish poet-prospector who loses his hard-earned sacks of gold in one turn of Hopkins' fixed roulette wheel, intentionally, as he's disillusioned by her leading him on during their previous meeting. It's a "cheap price for such an education," he notes sardonically. What's made him hate her so? Since it's yet another trite romantic triangle thing with the older wealthy short guy who knows the angles vs. the tall, naive and handsome young idiot, each competing for the hand of the fallen-but-not-too-far-she-can't-be-lifted dame, I don't have to tell you that this all began back when she and Joel fell in love as strangers both seeking shelter from a rainstorm at an old deserted cabin on the road outside of town. Think Eddie's fallin' for that old lame excuse, even if it is true? He's not, see? Myeah. Notes Cinephile:

"There’s little sexual tension, chemistry, or even the vaguest hint of innuendo between the two leads, it would seem a sign attached to one of the gambling tables in Robinson’s casino which reads “No vulgarity allowed at this table” is a rule disappointingly applied to the rest of the film as well. It has little visual identity beyond Ray June’s atmospherically foggy night-time photography (which does some fine work with shadows towards the end) and little of the cynicism or edge which marked out other collaborations with screenwriter Ben Hecht, instead opting for flowery, pretentious dialogue many of the cast clearly struggle with."

I keep forgetting Ben Hecht wrote this, maybe I block it out intentionally, see? Myeah!  It does show that nobody hits it out of the park every time and even great writers can sometimes resemble hacks fresh out of remedial poetry class.

Another thing: gambling is a hard thing to make cinematically engaging and Hawks isn't a great one for making money seem important. Lugging sacks of gold through thickets thieves like McRae does seems foolhardy, unrealistic, i.e. you can't show a guy getting his pocket picked one second then another one lugging overflowing sacks of gold around by himself in the thick of a hungry, eagle-eyed foggy night throng and not getting his corpse picked clean inside of of six seconds. This inconsistent financial environment takes us as far from the usually clear-cut Hawksian sense of group solidarity and danger-pinpointing as you can get. As 'Old Atrocity,' Walter Brennan alone seems to achieve some sort of noble savagery, his prolonged survival intimating a hard-won cool that's very Hawksian. That his disheveled, foul-smelling self is welcome even in the glossy casino (where he lures strangers for a cut of the trimmings) makes him one of those rare figures (like C3PO or John Holmes in WONDERLAND) who can believably wander back and forth between classes, enemy camps, nature, and civilization at will. Add some throw-away eye-roll lines like "it's hard rowing when I'm so emotional" and it still adds up to a tritely formulaic but well-detailed socio-historic romantic triangle thriller that's no SAN FRANCISCO (1936), nor even--when all is said and done--a TIGER SHARK.

THE ROAD TO GLORY (1936)

(Portugese DVD - Region 1)

***

William Faulkner co-wrote this name-only remake of one of Hawks' silent films. It's hard to imagine it was made a year after BARBARY COAST (or two after TWENTIETH CENTURY!) as it looks straight from 1930, which this time is actually a compliment. Plotwise, it's FARWELL TO ARMS city again--but with a truly dreamy Hawksian woman (June Lang) as the WWI Parisian combat nurse. With her beautiful black velvet choker-wrapped neck, pale skin, bangs, a sexy Red Cross on her cape, and a low-registered speaking voice, Lang has the air of Lauren Bacall on the cover of the March 1943 Harper's Bazaar --which famously led to her discovery and overnight stardom in To Have and Have Not. You can see the same prematurely world-weary petulance in Lang's face all through this 1936 prelude.

Note the self-reflexion that gives this picture such power,
as if pausing to remember your dead soldier husband was a normal prelude to walking through
selfless sacrifice's vampiric portal. Or if she's just given so much blood she's
about to pass out?

An uneasy mixture of inter-generational jealousy (old needy fathers were apparently allowed to enlist so they could stalk and cramp the style of their soldier sons), and the same old love triangle we've already seen ad nausea in this post alone (Hemingway really fucked that generation up), ROAD agrees with itself that war is hell, but sure spends a lot of time wallowing in the muck. New officer Frederic March meets nurse Lang when they take shelter together from a bombing raid in a blasted-out basement French saloon. He plays some tunes on the dusty piano, and puts his coat over her as the rafters rattle and the dust falls and she lies down in a chair. Unaware she's the mistress of shaky drunk Warner Baxter (his new C.O., of course), March shows up at her hospital the next day, playing cute while she tries to bandage the wounded and dying --how dare she not fawn over him? Once Baxter finds out March is kicking in his stall, of course, it's suicide mission time, a bit like Gary Cooper in Von Sternberg's MOROCCO, or any of six dozen other films from the era (like FRIENDS AND LOVERS, reviewed a few posts ago). Adding to the trouble is Baxter's father (Lionel Barrymore) showing up and--as Lionel loved to do-- hogging screen time before blowing up his fellow Frenchmen with a grenade thrown in the wrong direction. March puts up with it all stoically, and there's never a guess how it ends, DAWN PATROL-style. Oh wait, you guessed? How smart you are, Steve... Do you know "Hong Kong Blues"?

A memorable segment of the film involves Germans digging underneath the Allied lines while the French soldiers trapped above can do nothing but wait it out, rolling cigarettes with their shaky hands as the Germans scrape away below, knowing that as soon as the scraping stops the bombs are likely to go off. That's where the true courage is tested, that painful, prolonged waiting... and smoking and--if you've got some--drinking. Other swell scenes: a rousing charge across no-man's land and a sneaky nighttime flank maneuver, but in the end it's still the same auld triangle and pasty sermons on the ignominy of war. We feel like pawns in the grip of a writer with a theme and message rather than a director with the guts to let that highlighter pen fall to the floor and trust his own shoot-from-the-gut sense of existential comedy, overlapping dialogue, cigarettes, whiskey, coffee, and one damned good looking low-voiced girl, i.e. the sort of director Hawks would become in a few more years. This time, well, at least he finally figured out the last part.

See also, the 1932 Hawks film THE CROWD ROARS, which I capsuled earlier. 
See also, the 1930 Hawks original THE DAWN PATROL which I capsuled later
See also - LATER HAWKS for reviews of RED LINE 7000 and HATARI

ALSO:
I Unravel and Explain the Entire Twisted Solution to Both BIG SLEEPs
Repetition Convulsions (w/ TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT)
Momentum Mori: TWENTIETH CENTURY (1934)
"We seem to go way back" - BRINGING UP BABY, LADY EVE, BELL, BOOK AND CANDLE
Erich's All-Time Favorite 25 Films (half are Hawks)
John Monk Saunders' Flying Death Drive: DAWN PATROL (1931), LAST FLIGHT, ACE OF ACES, EAGLE AND THE HAWK
Monsters Crash the Pajama Party: DARK KNIGHT RISES, TARGETS, HIS GIRL FRIDAY,  (8/6/12)
Cinema of Castration: I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE, ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS

If I was a TCM guest programmer / and you were a (cobra) lady: FREUD, COBRA WOMAN, DISHONORED, CEILING ZERO

Don't you hate when TCM guest programmers pick titles from the same old classic safety list TCM shows constantly? Here's their big chance and they pick Lawrence of Arabia, Casablanca and, um, maybe you've never heard of it, Citizen Kane! Yeah, right... over and over.

I love those films too, but we need guest programmers like me, who are keenly aware of all the films TCM hasn't shown in at least 100 years, if ever. These four are classics that should be ubiquitous but instead are never aired... why? Why, Nat?

8 PM - FREUD 

(aka "The Secret Passion")

1962, dir. John Huston

Why don't they exhume Huston's Freud to tie in with Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method? Are Freud's theories of infantile sexuality still too shocking? Any John Huston film starring Montgomery Clift and filmed in expressionist-Victorian hothouse black-and-white should be a mainstay anywhere. It's not perfect--it's very brainy and theoretical as we follow Freud's life from a young intern at a psychiatric hospital challenging the status quo, up through studies of hypnosis in Paris, and still pushing to find the secret of the unconscious mind and how to release it from its airless tomb and thus cure hysteria. We see Freud continuing his discourse via a series of conversations in and out of Austrian carriages and walking through hallowed halls. But then, the gas lights dim a bit and Huston eases back on his narration. Slowly a kind of mist coheres and it becomes an expressionist nightmare horror film, leading inexorably to Freud's big 'ah-hah!' moment, the witnessing the belly of the beast slide open to reveal its secrets. We're being shown the first 'meta'-dream, the tools for analyzing all itself being forged right there, onscreen. Damnit, I had this on an old dupe but now it's long gone and I want to see once more Klaus Kinski =making love to a mannequin leg while the visibly uncomfortable, drug-addicted, partially paralyzed, perfectly cast Clift looks on, agape, theories coagulating from the murk of his patient's hysteria and crawling half-formed into his mind. Imagine a prequel to Suddenly Last Summer, with Clift's shrink dreaming (or rather nightmaring) his way back to being the world's first psychoanalyst, embattled by the accredited establishment and clinging to what shreds of Tuinal-induced hallucinatory calm he can while while he treats his Venable patients --that's truth, that's Freud! We need it now more than ever. God helps us if we don't get it.

PS -8/19- I have seen it again, I got a Korean import dupe from ebay, though I fear it's somewhat cut from a fuller frame to fit a widescreen TV. The image is good, but I realize Kinski isn't even in the film. Did I hallucinate him? I saw this movie only a few times while deep in the throes of alcoholic hallucinatory madness (the pefect way to see any movie) so maybe I saw a different film?)

10 PM: COBRA WOMAN

1944 - dir. Robert Siodmak

Technicolor is king and shapely Maria Montez is queen here on the Island of the Cobra as well as her identical twin, good and pure and rightful queen, engaged to Ramu (Hall) who swims to her rescue after she's kidnapped right before the marriage ceremony. Bold crazy greens pulse all through the inspired costumes and there's tarot card-level archetypal juice drizzled over a plot that's strictly serial: See the evil Montez ordering virgins into the volcano by the hundo at the height of her ecstatic and sexy snake dance! See her letting a man she doesn't even know kiss her under the water. Realize that 1944 was the height of the war, and censorship made sure all the skin had to be in pools (would a genre like Esther Williams pool musicals ever be needed once censorship relaxed?) or on ice in short skirts (Sonia Henie?), i.e. folded into the story naturally via displays of athletic prowess. Luckily we're liberated! Not just from the Axis (who also loved 'clean' displays of athletic prowess) but from the Catholic legion of 'Decency.' I digress...

As for the cast, Montez is good/bad and awesome; Sabu is annoying; Huntz Hall forgettable, Chaney silent, the score awesome with timpani, the language pidgined. The king cobra Montez dances for is pretty floppy (though it does have a good tongue). It's no accident that right before I popped this DVD in something also from the WW2 era was on TCM, about an officer who had to ship out before his marriage could be consummated, the sexual tension there ran cold and coded, as was the style of the time, the censors claimed. The interrupted wedding at the start of Cobra Woman plays on, maybe even satirizes that idea. Religion and its ability to make people act against their own best interest is satirized mercilessly in the witty script. When Ramu asks why the people of the island willingly go to their deaths in the volcano, the queen (Maria Nash) notes that "the ceremony appeals to their emotions... fear has made them religious fanatics!" Sound familiar?

Luckily when the boys finally came home from the war, they were too used to fighting to let some pious control freaks tell them what do do, and censorship began to collapse into the shadows of film noir.

Exploded with fairy tale picture book gone wild flair by the great Robert Siodmak, Cobra Woman is more about the shot and the image than the story, which is strictly from Flash Gordon-ville, but the presence of an evil princess (ala Aura in Flash) is really refreshing and cool. Such a figure is archetypal but sorely lacking in the Lord of the Rings and Star Wars franchises, both of which are ubiquitous while Cobra is available only from the Universal Vault Collection, though their DV-R is pretty badass. And you can find it here! The colors look gorgeous, with lots of dark serpent greens and dusky blood reds.

11:30 PM DISHONORED

1931 - dir. Josef von Sternberg

Dietrich and Joe made seven lovely films together - most are on DVD--Blue Angel, Morocco, Blonde Venus, Scarlet Empress, Devil is a Woman, but two--Shanghai Express and Dishonored--are not. Thanks to savvy guest programmers, Scarlet's become a mainstay on TCM lately, but Dishonored remains MIA and it's a damned shame. The (true-ish) story's been better told by Fraulein Doktor but this is better than Garbo's Mata Hari. Here Dietrich plays a Prussian spy who seduces men and steals their military secrets. But she weakens and aids the enemy, though why she should choose a creepy, leering Victor McLaglen to give up her life for is beyond me. What a waste! But it's Sternberg so we never get the sense she loves him so much as she set him free because it twists the masochistic knife in us, and says fuck you to the world. Anyway, she is victorious in an earlier maneuver against Warner Oland; a New Years masquerade shows off Sternberg's penchant for crowd scene bacchanals and there's a great final firing squad scene that should be embraced by self-destructive hipsters everywhere.

1 AM - CEILING ZERO 

1936 - dir. Howard Hawks

I might have missed this over the years because of the bland title and I dislike Pat O'Brien, but it's by Howard Hawks and also stars Jimmy Cagney, and say what you want about Pat and I will but he talks fast and Hawks needs rapid patter overlapping dialogue men and I'll tell you something else there's nothing like Hawks when he has two good actors who can talk like machine guns and aren't afraid to display motormouths we usually associate only with speed freaks which isn't to say Dexedrine is bad at least not in Hollywood where 18 hour workdays are normal and a man like Hawks wants you looking wired and ready, so where the hell is it? The film I mean? Sure there's parts of it that show Hawks was still perfecting his formula, there's bad vibes with Cagney's bad habit of poaching women and getting Stu Erwin in trouble with the missus, and everyone's cockblocking each other, and the encroaching regulations (delivered by Barton Maclane) and safety violation up-to-code authority browbeating... just imagine how much less fun ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS would be if there were regulations and burdensome officials and nagging, worrying wives, instead of no regulations at all and only cool officials down to get down and party hearty and the only non-local girls to worry about are either Jean Arthur, on her best behavior, and Rita Hayworth, at her hotness prime? Luckily there's something here that film doesn't have, a cute young girl pilot-in-training named Tommy, of course, and played by June Travis like she's to the Hawksian woman manor born.

Pre-Code Capsules 8: THE NARROW CORNER, WEST OF BROADWAY, HEADLINE SHOOTER, THE CROWD ROARS, TOP SPEED

THE NARROW CORNER 

(1933) Directed by Alfred E. Green

****

You never know what classic author's film adaptations are going to ferment into wine and which to vinegar after they're buried for decades in obscurity then exhumed for TV, but the pre-code steamy and existential South Seas commonwealth sagas of W. Somerset Maugham--a flood triggered by the iconic success of RAIN (1931) have become a very potent, tasty wine and THE NARROW CORNER is the good stuff you keep for yourself during dark nights of the soul. Why is it so forgotten while the self-absorbed forgotten man whining of something of a similar existential decadent modernist play/film like THE PETRIFIED FOREST is so lauded?  Leslie Howard's suicidal rambling in FOREST smacks today of self-pity but Maugham characters's dead-eyed stare into the riptide--where life is wrest from us as a berry from a branch by a half asleep Mexican gardener--is admirable, heroic, and damned hilarious. Cheers! Tape it and save it forever.

The story of a wan rich kid Brit who has to take it on the lam to the South Seas after he kills... ahem... the lady's husband fits its star, Douglas Fairbanks Jr.  to a double-crossed tee. We can see in him the natural actor who's absorbed everything he saw and heard as a spoiled child in the thick of his famed father's silent era decadence, realized it was his birthright but never quite respecting it, and binging that gentlemanly ambivalence to bear on his caustic character. Starting the film as a peevish spoiled bounder, he comes to hate himself and the women who fight over him because then he has to deal with jealous husbands and fiancees--which here will ultimately include Ralph Bellamy as a naive Dutch plantation owner. Fairbanks reflects his own history as a man who more or less had fame handed to him on a platter because of his name, and rather than become utterly spoiled (believing the hype) has lost faith in the inescapably shallow world that fawns over him no matter how surly he behaves. His dad has chartered a ship to take him around the islands in a way to stay ahead of the law and evade further scandal and he sulks mightily upon it. But when the ship almost goes down a storm, he becomes impressed at the peptic ulcer-afflicted drunkard captain (Arthur Hohl) who drunkenly laughs in the face of the lashing winds. The storm waves crashing into the ship over and over, soaring into the wind, all night, does something to his soul, cleans it out you might say. And the next morning he's a newly-minted man instead of a spoiled surly brat. Any seasoned tripper will surely relate. Without a terrifying, grueling and prolonged initiation (hazing, if you will), the man cannot change, Danger and endurance are the heat in the forge through which one can soften the sword of their self and hammer out a new shape.  

Meanwhile a debauched doctor (Dudley Digges) also aboard ship tells his trusting Chinese servant how many (opium) pipe loads he'll have every night, to 'ahem' unwind ("seven pipes tonight... no more, no less,") rendering him useless at critical junctures but leaving him always self-effacing, droll and unblinking as he stares into the void, his opiated brain alight with the zonked poetry of a Eugene O'Neill or Tennessee Williams-style poetic, existential drunkard ("Regret nothing. Life is short, nature is hostile, and man... is ridiculous.") He's the type of character who no longer exists outside of classic modern plays, one borne of the WWI trenches and dogfight skies, the drink a prayer for the dead all ready; hurrah for the next who dies mentality. It's a mentality we've lost in today's climate, and frankly I blame nanny state morals and the turn away from manly gravitas that is the result.

There's also William Mong (above) as a mean old Swedish sea captain, boasting to fellow salty dog Arthur Hohl that he used to pilot slavers, and that he wants to gut his son-in-law (the eminently guttable Reginald Owen as a professor, idling for years with a translation of some obscure Portuguese poem); Sidney Toler as the agent who secures the passage; and Patricia Ellis as the lovely daughter engaged to lunkhead Ralph Bellamy. He's such a good soul that Fairbanks decides to go decent, and that just makes things worse! Still, you can't argue with the beautiful Hollywood exotica scenery and sense that once upon a time it really was possible to buy illicit passage away from the long arm of the law, even if you immediately found the same old troubles when you got outside its reach, but the lack of educated white people around the islands made it easy to make friends with those you stumbled on. There are very few movies that really get what it's like to be desired by women to the point you're constantly pissing offEE rivals and winding up in disputes between roommates and husbands. Don't ask me how I know, but I do. And so, clearly does Maugham because, NARROW CORNER gets it super right. 'Bros before hos' then becomes the golden rule, and I also love Fairbanks' character is named Fred and Bellamy is named Erich. Fred is my own real brother's name! Eight pipes tonight, no more, no less!

WEST OF BROADWAY 

(1931) Dir. Harry Beaumont

**1/2

Here's a curio starring former-matinee idol John Gilbert, caught like a fly in the amber of the sound era: when he tries to sound manly and tough he just sounds hung over, speech halting awkwardly like he's sending a morse code S.O.S. in the spaces between the words of his dialogue, hoping his buddies off-camera will translate and rush... to his aid... with  a flask. In the early sound equipment days they were taught to take long pauses and say words... clearly. It's like he's counting director-mandated seconds between the words.

But it's worth seeing for the brave way Gilbert captures the art of the shaky rebound. His character comes home from the Great War,E  hero with four bullets still in him, to find his fiancee Ann (Madge Evans) not there to meet him, and instead off with some slime ball. He laughs it sardonically away but it hurts and she's gorgeous and his hired rebound girl Dot (Lois Moran) is merely "pretty in a trashy sort of way." "Dot the I and cross the Ann," he says, while introducing them to each other at the (I guess) the only swanky nightclub in NYC. "Double cross." Rueful stuff!

And it's worth it for the sly way the waiter says "your package sir," and slips Gilbert a fifth wrapped in a white towel, low under the table at the club, so the cops don't see it, and for the sleazy, no holds-barred details of Dot's life as a hired girl who's brave enough to refuse Gilbert's hand-out (she and her girlfriend owe ten days' back rent) even as she notes to her friend that at Gilbert's party there were "hands all over me" and then gropes herself in a resigned way to illustrate.

But the best part is poor Gilbert's shakes the morning after he marries the hired girl (oops). I don't think I've ever seen Saint Vitus dance so accurately rendered. And for her part it's great when Dot takes over as woman of the house and gets all racist, barking at the Chinese cook, or sprawling out in a wicker chair to shoot the shit about Jerry with his high class friends, like she owns the place (hired girls who get married to drunken playboys in black-outs are always either ruthless gold-diggers or good girls awaiting redemption, seldom are they neither). And when he tries to quit drinking the cowboys are singing outside and suddenly you tap into RIO BRAVO's scene where Dean Martin almost takes a shot of whiskey while the Mariachi death song plays down the street from the jail. As Dot, Moran is a little firecracker but her pal is no Joan Blondell, and when we see Gilbert ponder whether or not to keep her after their marriage's been annulled you feel he's genuinely tapped into that ambivalence Frank Sinatra had with Shirley MacLaine in SOME CAME RUNNING. But Gilbert, he was almost all the way tapped out, and it shows. Man, those shakes are something else.

And Gilbert's a good enough actor to use his personal desperation in a scene: you can feel his desperate stiff upper lip trembling as he finds out Ann's moved on. She could be standing for his entire female silent film fan base, which was once universal and then nonexistent. Like Barrymore's drunken has-been in DINNER AT EIGHT, he's a classic case of an actor's pain and his character's bleeding into each other, the pain of being smart enough to know when you're outdated, when your matinee adoration is all wound up, and you're too drunk to find a new illusion, and seeing the only way to go is down, so might as well get drunker and plunge into the void like a cock-eyed  W. Somerset Maugham kamikaze. All else is vanity.

HEADLINE SHOOTER 

(1933) Dir. Otto Brauer

***

Frances Dee is a swell little half-pint in this pre-code from the golden pinnacle of movies 1933. Still a a decade away from becoming the nurse we all fell in love with in I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE (1942) she's still one of the few actresses who can make low-key sobriety sexy. She even manages to exhibits some serious chemistry with the star of this 'press corp.' action-comedy, the briefly beloved (never by me) Will Gargan as a newsreel cameraman. Lee Tracy is relegated to wingman and wryly notes: "They want you to chase 'em, and once you catch 'em they hang on ya like a ton of bricks." Then he gets crushed by a ton of actual bricks while filming a warehouse fire. Ironic! Ralph Bellamy is again the jilted fiancee who's really a swell guy hoping to lure Dee home, you know, where the heart is. It's one of the few times he's actually cooler than the lead. There's a typically Warner Brothers climactic gangster shoot-out and a quite a few real-time floods, fires, and shots lensed during the Santa Monica earthquake, which came conveniently along during shooting. It's startling how at ease the actors are around these real-time calamities, with reporter Dee offering comfort to shaken witnesses as she makes sure to get the signature on the release statement, showing that solid mix of sexy warmth and maternal compassion that would one day make zombies walk with her through whispering cane fields of admiration.

THE CROWD ROARS 

(1932) Dir. Howard Hawks

***

The cars are game and Cagney's explosive, but it's kind of tough to care because it's not like racing cars really contributes anything to society, and mainly its because he's also such a shit to his women, i.e. the groupies of the track.. He's a race car driver who tries to warn his little brother off of the loose ladies he himself runs around with (like Joan Blondell); they're good enough to shag, but not to marry, and the brother is of course all ready to take the first girl he meets at face value and propose before bedding etc. But so what? It's Ann freaking Dvorak, who wouldn't want to marry her instantly? What's Cagney's problem? Well, all that fades when one of his buddies dies in a wreck and the race keeps going, so Cagney starts to smell his old pal frying in the blaze every time he drives around the bend, around and around and around...Sure, that's enough to put anyone off his feed.

So he flips out; he leaves the race, and the racing world. Ann Dvorak chases him down to the Indy 500, and we get some great scenes of Cagney asking for jobs and being turned down by various crews because he's lost his nerve. Lost his nerve? Cagney? A great parade of typically laconic Hawks-types has to say no to him, and it's here more than anywhere else you can feel the Hawksian touch in its infancy, and when Cagney finally tells Ann about the crash and the smell of McHugh's burning corpse, he cracks up in her arms, and from then on it's racing with style and you know it's not just Cagney's macho racer that has learned women are wiser than men and sexually assertive girls who make the first move deserve respect instead of contempt, it's Hawks too. And maybe Dvorak and Blondell are the ones that taught him, like they teach Cagney.

Maybe? Maybe nothin'!

TOP SPEED 

(1930) Dir. Mervyn Leroy

***

An early sound comedy-musical (with most of the music numbers cut) starring the rubber-mouthed comedian (the millionaire willing to 'adopt some' with Jack Lemmon in SOME LIKE IT HOT), and a daring chronicle of the years before the Depression, this is a last gasp of college letters and class resentment. The passing era of sexual repression lingers in lines like, "I'm so modest I won't allow lamb chops on the table unless they have those paper pants on." Both suggestively lewd and comically moralist, the film sums up the only sane response to the draconian, near fundamentalist level of sexual repression endured under the watchful eye of hotel detectives, chaperones, and social reform-minded wives of the era, who did their damnedest to make premarital sex impossible. Herein we also learn the origins of now forgotten phrases like "over a barrel" (it's a protean kind of CPR given to drowning victims, put them face down over a [lying on its side] barrel and roll the person back and forth to pump the water out of their lungs) and "counting sheep" (apparently it was a big fad like Atkins is today, and Brown explains it complete with hand gestures). And since 1930 was such a 'scandalous' time, well, it was very easy to be scandalous. Just being caught in a hotel room with a woman not your wife could earn you a public flogging, and from thence we get those boudoir comedies of sneaking around fire escapes in one's underwear, hiding under beds while the house dick peers through the keyhole. It's hard to get that kind of naughty steam going in our more permissive age, but here's a world where men can't show their torsos on the beach and have to wear full body swim suits. It explains a lot... about Saudi Arabia.

Coming off like a primordial Jim Carey, Brown is a surprisingly manly presence, and when his character pretends to be a millionaire so he can get a room at a posh hotel he sounds just like Walter Matthau, or did Matthau emulate Brown as a kid, catching films like TOP SPEED on matinees while anti-Semite bullies skulked outside in the Brooklyn streets? Footage of the climactic boat race is ridiculously mismatched to Brown's rear projection drunkenness but Edward Arnold disparages well the news his future son-in-law took a bribe, but in true financial savvy the pal just takes the money and screws his briber, bets it on himself via his stooge buddy Joe E. Brown, and then pockets the profit. Oh to be alive in an age where millionaires were made so effortlessly.

Oh, but we'd have to get married first.