The Public Enemy (1931)

1931 saw Warner Brothers release two movies that define the gangster movie of the 1930s. The first was Little Caesar, followed a few weeks later by The Public Enemy. Both were huge box-office hits. Little Caesar remains a classic, a movie that is as impressive today as it was 80 years ago. The same cannot be said of The Public Enemy, a middling movie saved by a stupendous performance by James Cagney,

Tom Powers (Cagney) and his childhood buddy Matt Doyle (Edward Woods) are poor Irish immigrants living on the mean streets of the big city. Tom’s brother Mike is a hard-working law-abiding citizen. Tom is a thug from the word go. As a kid he’s a petty thief with a mean streak. As an adult he’s a mobster in the making.
Prohibition gives him his opportunity. They team up with an older Irish crook, Paddy Ryan, and soon Tom and Matt are big shots. Meanwhile Tom is tiring of his live-in girlfriend Kitty, and he becomes even more tired of her when he meets the glamorous Gwen Alllen (Jean Harlow).

The rise of their gang causes concern among rival racketeers and a full-blown gang war is ready to erupt.
Interestingly enough Edward Woods was originally cast in the lead role with Cagney in the supporting role as Matt but Wellman decided Cagney was the one with star quality and reversed the roles. Woods is good, but he’s no Jimmy Cagney.

I’m a huge fan of Jean Harlow but she really is terrible in this film. It isn’t really her fault. At this stage of her career no-one had yet discovered that her forte was comedy.
The picture was helmed by William A. Wellman, an erratic director at best although he had his moments. It’s a reasonably good movie but pales in comparison with Little Caesar. While Rico in Little Caesar achieves a kind of twisted grandeur Tom Powers remains just a cheap thug (despite Cagney’s best efforts). The Public Enemy just doesn’t quite generate enough interest in either the plotting or characterisation departments to make it a real classic of the gangster genre, but it’s still one of the movies you have to see if you have an interest in that genre.

Hunted (1952)

The 1950s was something of a golden age for British crime thrillers, and Hunted is a fine example of the breed.

It’s the story of two people on the run. One is a sailor, Chris Lloyd, who has killed his wife’s lover in a crime of passion. The other is a seven-year-old boy fleeing his brutal adoptive father.

Chris Lloyd (Dirk Bogarde) doesn’t really want Robbie (Jon Whitely) trailing along after him but he can’t get rid of him. The boy claims to dislike him but he insists on following him. The boy becomes an increasing liability for the hapless sailor who will hang if the police catch him but he gradually grows oddly fond of the kid. And despite something of a violent temper Chris is basically a kind-hearted soul. He’s been hurt himself and he can’t bring himself to hurt Robbie by abandoning him. And in a hostile world they really have only each other anyway. It’s an odd kind of buddy film.

This is a thriller without gunfights, in fact without any actual onscreen violence at all. Of course Chris’s fatal act of violence towards the man who who stole his wife and the violence Robbie has suffered at the hands of his adoptive father are the driving forces of the film even though we don’t see any of these events. The fact that we don’t see the violent acts actually strengthens the film because it concentrates our attention on the psychological results rather than acts themselves.

While there’s no violence there’s plenty of suspense. Director Charles Crichton had a varied career in film and television and does a very solid job.

The key to the film is the focus on the personalities of Chris and Robbie and on their relationship as it progresses from toleration to affection. Jon Whitely is likeable as the kid. Dirk Bogarde initially alienates our sympathies by his apparently callous attitude towards his young travelling companion but as the movie progresses we slowly gain understanding of Chris’s character and the reasons for his bitterness and we gradually come to realise that he’s actually a fundamentally gentle and sensitive man. It takes time for him to regain his trust in humanity. It’s a complex and subtle performance, as you’d expect from Bogarde.

While it can’t really be described a a film noir it does have some affinities with film noir with its doomed protagonist who has led himself in a desperate predicament without ever quite understanding how it happened. There’s plenty of atmospheric and suitably gloomy black-and-white cinematography, so if you’re a film noir fan you’re probably going to enjoy this one.

Definitely worth seeing. The out-of-print Australian DVD unfortunately seems to be the only DVD release for this movie. Recommended if you can find a copy.

Lonelyhearts (1958)

Nathanael West’s 1933 short novel Miss Lonelyhearts is one of the dark masterpieces of American fiction. The style and structure of the book are such as to make any kind of film adaptation a formidable challenge. The 1958 attempt, with the title shortened to Lonelyhearts, is a major cinematic train-wreck.

West’s novels are often viewed as a response to the Great Depression. This is a monumental misunderstanding of his work. West had no interest in political causes. He was not a social problem writer. He was not concerned with economic poverty. His concern was with what he saw as the deep-seated moral and spiritual bankruptcy of 20th century America. His view is pessimistic and cynical. He admired Dostoyevsky and was fascinated by religious themes. Miss Lonelyhearts expresses a yearning for spiritual redemption but without any belief that it is actually possible.

All of which made Dore Schary completely the wrong person to write a movie adaptation. Schary was a liberal, believing in human perfectibility, something West would have regarded with scorn. Schary, in his days as president of MGM in the early 50s, wanted to make social problem movies with a political message. The collision between the sharply opposed philosophies of West and Schary was always likely to be disastrous and in fact Schary’s screenplay is an unmitigated catastrophe. It tears the heart out of West’s novel, removes most of West’s characteristic gallows humour, and leaves us with nothing but a dreary social melodrama.

West’s novel has little in the way of straightforward narrative. Miss Lonelyhearts is a young newspaperman who handles the paper’s agony column allows himself to become involved in the pathetic personal dramas of the people who write to him. His idealism crumbles under the impact of the pettiness, selfishness, and dishonesty that he finds wherever he goes. It’s a kind of black comedy religious fable with Miss Lonelyhearts as an ironic Christ figure.

The movie preserves the bare outlines of West’s plot whilst comprehensively missing the point. It lacks the courage to preserve the essential bleakness of the story. Schary could not bring himself to present his characters as hopeless cases lacking in any dignity and without any prospect of saving themselves or being saved.

Of course many movies bear little resemblance to the books on which they are based, and are none the worse for it. Unfortunately this movie adds nothing of interest to compensate for what has been lost.

The movie’s problems don’t end there. There’s also the casting. Montgomery Clift has the necessary self-pity but his performance is embarrassingly self-obsessed and mannered. One again I’m left wondering how Clift ever gained a reputation as a great actor. Dolores Hart is insufferably bland as his girlfriend.

The one redeeming feature of this sorry mess is Robert Ryan as the paper’s editor, Shrike. Ryan is the only person involved in the movie who seems to understand what the story is about and how to approach it. His performance makes no concession to dreary realism. It’s theatrical and over-the-top. He does not speak his lines. He declaims them. Which is exactly what is required. He also gets the movie’s best line when he tells his wife he won’t fire Miss Lonelyhearts, "Because I enjoy seeing youth betray their promises- it lights up all the numbers on my pinball machine." Shrike has his own personal demons to deal with and his anguished relationship with his wife (played reasonably successfully by Myrna Loy) is one of the few elements in the movie that works.

Vincent J. Donehue’s direction is pedestrian but at least the movie looks good (as you’d expect with John Alton as director of photography).

Despite its general awfulness it’s worth seeing solely for the joy of seeing Robert Ryan in full flight.

Slightly Scarlet (1956)

In his commentary track to Allan Dwan’s Slightly Scarlet Max Allan Collins likens the movie to a collision between the lush glossy world of the Douglas Sirk-Ross Hunter films of the 50s and the world of film noir. And really I can’t come up with a better description of this movie.

It’s based on one of James M. Cain’s lesser known novels, Love's Lovely Counterfeit. It’s a tale of a romantic triangle involving two sisters and one gangster. As the movie opens one sister, Dorothy (Arlene Dahl) has just been released from prison. She’s a kleptomaniac (kleptomania being very popular in the Freud-obsessed 50s). She's the bad sister. The good sister is June (Rhonda Fleming). She’s a secretary to wealthy businessman Frank Jansen who is running for election as mayor on a policy of cleaning up crime in the notoriously corrupt Bay City.

We do have some slight doubts about the good sister though. She lives in a palatial home, which seems a little too opulent for a mere secretary. There are strong hints that she’s actually Jansen’s mistress and that she’s probably been getting paid for more than her shorthand skills. The bad sister certainly has her suspicions.



Then Ben Grace (John Payne) comes into their lives. Ben tells June that he can guarantee Frank Jansen’s election. June and Jansen are both rather naïve and they assume Ben is a public-spirited citizen eager to see honest government in Bay City. In fact Ben is counting on Jansen to get the city’s chief mob boss Solly Caspar out of the way so that Ben can step into his shoes.

June is clearly attracted to the smooth-talking and quietly charming Ben Grace but Dorothy has designs on him as well. Just to keep the plot nice and complicated Dorothy has been stealing again and Ben has used his connections to get her off, thus implicating the squeaky clean Frank Jansen in his corrupt dealings. Things get even more complicated when Solly Caspar arrives back in town (he’d fled to Mexico after the election).



The twist to this tale, and the element that makes it a film noir, is that Ben Grace is a gangster but he’s a gangster with a conscience. He’s a nice college-educated mobster who wants to shift his organisation’s activities away from areas like prostitution and drugs. He wants to concentrate in gambling since he figures that if people want to gamble someone will make money out of them and it might as well be him. He’s also a relatively non-violent crime boss. He considers violence to be inefficient and old-fashioned.

While there’s obviously an element of self-deception in all this Ben really does have moral scruples. As gangsters go he’s a nice guy. We care about him and we feel that he’s probably too decent to survive very well in the world he’s chosen.



John Payne gives an excellent performance, making Ben a classic anti-hero. Both Rhonda Fleming and Arlene Dahl are equally good.

Director of photography John Alton is perhaps the most acclaimed of all noir cinematographers and he manages to create his usual magic. For many people the mere fat that the movie was a widescreen Technicolor movie would disqualify it as noir, but Alton demonstrates that he could get a noir feel just as easily in Technicolor as in black-and-white. The contrast between the brightly lit colourful daylight scenes of June’s idyllic suburban life and the sinister shadows of the gangster’s world actually makes for a very effective noir feel.



The lush and opulent sets also serve rather neatly to emphasise the hidden world of corruption underneath the surface of glamour and wealth.

This is a movie that is generally dismissed as being of little interest. This is a serious misjudgment. Veteran director Allan Dwan does a fine job, there’s an excellent cast and Robert Blees contributes a clever and literate screenplay. It’s an absorbing and entertaining if slightly unconventional film noir, well worth a purchase.

Junior Bonner (1972)

Junior Bonner saw Sam Peckinpah move away from westerns and action movies to make an offbeat little film that is in fact one of his most satisfying efforts.

It’s still a tough guy movie of sorts, but it’s about tough guys who no longer have any place in the world.

Steve McQueen plays JR Bonner (or Junior as he’s also also known), a rodeo star on the long downhill slide to failure. He’s never been any good at anything else and now the years are catching up and he soon won’t even be much use as a rodeo rider. At his last rodeo he tried and failed to ride the meanest bull on the circuit (a bull (ironically named Sunshine). The opening sequences show him thrown from the bull and leaving the arena, a man battered, weary and defeated. Throughout the movie Peckinpah keeps cutting back to these scenes of Bonner’s failure.



Now JR has returned to his home town of Prescott, Arizona for another rodeo. Things have changed while he’s been gone. His sleazy real estate agent brother Curly has sold out the farm from under his father, Ace Bonner (Robert Preston). Ace is another former rodeo star whose life has been a series of failures. Now he’s lost all his money in an ill-advised gld-prospecting scheme. But Ace is undaunted - he’s heading for Australia to go prospecting again. I guess no-one has told him he’s more than a century late for the Australian gold rush. Ace is a cheerful loser who’ll try his hand at anything to make a buck. Well, anything short of actual work.



Junior’s mother Elvira (Ida Lupino) is the one who holds the family together. Life with Ace has been a series of disappointments but she still can’t resist his boyish charm.

JR has been left with one ambition - to ride Sunshine for eight seconds. It would be one last victory. He’s even prepared to offer half his prize money to Buck Roan (who runs the rodeo) if he can ensure that JR draws Sunshine in the bull-riding event.



That’s about all the plot consists of and it’s not much. And what there is doesn’t really go anywhere. But that’s the point. These are people whose lives aren’t really going anywhere. What saves the movie is Peckinpah’s affection for these amiable losers, and the subtlety and depth with which the characters are drawn. And some very fine acting.

Ida Lupino still lights up the screen. Robert Preston (as always) steals every scene he’s in. Joe Don Baker makes a wonderful Curly - he’s sleazy but he’s not a mere monster. He’s just moved with the times. The rodeo now exists purely for the tourists. It lures them to the town where locals like Curly can have a shot at fleecing them.



Steve McQueen in the title role gives a marvelously effective performance. JR is watching his life slowly slip away. You know he’s going to end up like Ace, drinking too much and living on past glories and dreaming of a future that has passed him by, But he has no regrets. He knows no other life. And if he had a choice this is still the life he’d choose. This is one of two superb performances he gave for Peckinpah in 1972 (the other being The Getaway), both of which are seriously underrated.



The two great dangers facing a movie like this are excessive sentimentality and overdone irony. Peckinpah skillfully avoids both pitfalls. He even manages to end the movie in a perfectly satisfying way. It’s a finely crafted movie. Arguably one of the most unfairly neglected, and best, American movies of the 70s.

Other Men's Women (1931)

Other Men's Women is the kind of cinematic oddity that could probably only have been produced in Hollywood’s wild and crazy pre-code era.

This 1931 movie starts out as a rather laboured comedy, then switches to melodrama. It makes no concessions to realism. That would usually endear a film to me but I found this to be a very hard movie to like.

Two childhood buddies work as railroad enginemen. Bill (Grant Withers) is a likeable drunk while Jack (Regis Toomey) is a quiet steady family man. Jack decides that the best way to settle Bill down is to invite him to live in his house. Maybe sharing a house with Jack and his wife Lily (Mary Astor) will encourage Bill to change his ways and start becoming a responsible citizen.

Jack’s plan is one of those things that seemed like a good idea at the time. Of course what actually happens is that Bill and Lily fall in love. And then Bill and Jack quarrel, with violent and tragic results, results that lead to a spectacularly melodramatic conclusion.

The support cast is strong, headed by Joan Blondell and James Cagney.

The ingredients are there for a good film and it certainly has some great moments. These moments are entirely visual, demonstrating a formidable and delightful visual wit. James Cagney in evening dress prancing along the tops of a series of railway wagons, James Cagney arriving at a dancehall in his railway engineer’s uniform and stripping it off to reveal a tuxedo underneath, Bill jumping off his slow-moving train at it arrives at a station giving him enough time to have breakfast and flirt with the waitress before jumping back on the train as it finally leaves the station - these are classic pieces of cinematic magic.

And yet despite this the movie is something of a chore to sit through. Part of the problem is that the supporting cast (Cagney and Blondell) is a whole lot more impressive than than any of the three leads (Withers, Toomey and Astor). Withers and Toomey are simply awful, wooden and embarrassing, and Astor (usually a very competent actress) is unconvincing and dull. If only director William A. Wellman had had enough sense to promote Cagney and Blondell into the leading roles he might have had a terrific little picture on his hands.

As it stands the weak leads expose the contrived nature of the script and it all falls rather flat.

William A. Wellman had a somewhat uneven career and his reputation today is arguably a tad overrated.

An odd little movie that has some curiosity value but its main interest is seeing James Cagney on the brink of stardom and already displaying signs of the extraordinary charisma that was the hallmark of his glorious career.

Forty Guns (1957)

Sam Fuller’s 1957 offering Forty Guns may not be the oddest western ever made but it must come close. It’s an outrageous triumph of stye over substance and I loved every minute of it.

The outrageousness is established right from the opening scene. Famed gunslinger-turned-lawman Griff Bonnell (Barry Sullivan) and his brother Wes (Gene Barry) are riding into town on a buckboard when they encounter Jessica Drummond and her dragoons in a spectacular sequence that demonstrates Fuller’s mastery of the Cinemascope screen. Jessica (Barbara Stawnwyck) is the boss of Cochise County and her forty dragoons are her forty hired guns. Given that this movie is awash with sexual innuendo we’re bound to speculate that the dragoons might also form Jessica’s private harem. Yes, this movie is that outrageous.

Griff has come to serve a warrant on one of Jessica’s men, but before he has a chance to do so he encounters Jessica’s no-good brother Brock terrorising the town’s blind city marshall. When Griff gets around to calling on Jessica it’s clear there is an attraction between them, but the issue of Brock and his increasingly violent and out-of-control behaviour seems destined to keep them apart.

Jessica Drummond owns just about everyone who matters in the territory - judges, politicians, the governor, the county’s sheriff. The sheriff, Logan (Dean Jagger), is a weak man who nurses a hopeless passion for the formidable matriarch of Cochise County.

The plot is mostly a collection of familiar western themes but it’s not the plot that matters, it’s Fuller’s over-the-top treatment of the material and his stylistic excesses. Fuller uses the Cinemascope framing in spectacular fashion, and there re more fancy camera angles than you’ve ever seen in one movie. That sort of thing can be cheap and gimmicky but Fuller does it with enough visual wit to get away with it.

There’s a memorable scene in which Wes Bonnell admires his lady love (who happens to be a gunsmith) through a gun barrel. It’s typical of the risque humour that permeates the film. The scene in Jessica’s house with all forty of her dragoons seated at the immensely long dining table and all accommodated within the shot is a fine example of Fuller using what might have been dismissed as visual gimmickry to tell us all we need to know about the power dynamics between Jessica and her minions.

And Fuller tells us all e need to know about the feelings between Jessica and Griff by putting them in the middle of a tornado. It’s over-the-top but it works.

Even stranger are the musical interludes! Including the song about the high-ridin’ woman with a whip. They add an an almost surreal element to an already wildly eccentric movie. When it comes to the important scenes such as the climactic gunfight though Fuller is in complete control. It’s one of the best scenes of its type you’ll ever see, visually brilliant and full of black humour.

Stanwyck is superb. She was clearly enjoying herself and did all her own stunts including a frighteningly dangerous scene where she’s dragged behind a horse in the middle of a tornado. The supporting cast is generally good. Barry Sullivan has the right kind of masculine presence to perfectly complement Stanwyck’s matriarchal dominatrix. Gene Barry mixes charm and likeability and serves to lighten things up a little. John Ericson does everything but foam at the mouth as Brock but in a movie like this it’s a perfectly valid acting approach.

Forty Guns makes the supposedly revolutionary revisionist westerns of the 70s seem boringly conventional and staid. Fuller gives us an extravagant idiosyncratic but highly entertaining view of the wild west. This is a must-see western.

The region 4 DVD is bereft of extras but at least it preserves the correct Cinemascope framing and it looks pretty good.