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"I love the fine names men give each other to hide their greed and lust for adventure." The belle (Miriam Hopkins) goes West, arrives in San Francisco and is widowed before she's married, a mater of adapting to a new environment. It's New Year's Eve and, amid the raucousness of "Auld Lang Syne" at the casino, a quiet toast and understanding with the ruthless boss (Edward G. Robinson). "Law and order" in 1850s Sin City is a concern for the idealist with a newspaper (Frank Craven), the heroine meanwhile is content to preside over the roulette pit amid fancy words and casual killings. "Let us enjoy our mud puddle." Howard Hawks at home in the roisterous New World (cp. The Big Sky), the detached Scarface outlook takes stock of its violence and prejudices but has no truck with windbags. (The outraged editor speechifies before the outlaw crowd and sinks in the sludge.) With burro and Shelley aspirations, the prospector from New York (Joel McCrea) is a wandering Ben Hecht-Charles MacArthur self-portrait, "that's the trouble with being a poet at heart." Between the cabin meeting in a downpour and the rowboat escape in the fog, fortunes lost and regained at the crooked wheel—not a symbol of fate but a smokescreen for the characters' love and spite. Civilization by way of a free press and more than a little force, a splendid mock-trial as the lynch mob marches the enforcer (Brian Donlevy) through unpaved streets and up a rope. (On the other side, Walter Brennan's cheery cutthroat and his redemption: "I feel like a little white kitten, reborn.") "A bonanza," and a tip of the hat. Fuller (Park Row) and Mann (The Far Country) have studies of their own. With Harry Carey, Clyde Cook, Matt McHugh, Donald Meek, Rollo Lloyd, and J.M. Kerrigan. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |