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It opens on Char's "pieds de caillou" and swiftly gets down to business, the vagabond (Richard Arlen) looking for work finds instead a shotgunned body at the breakfast table, the abused orphan (Louise Brooks) recounts the events in an overlap of close-up and rushing images. "Ever hop a freight train?" Grassy hill, water tower and incoming locomotive, a composition set in motion by the figures scrambling to leap on board, typical of William Wellman's fusion of movement by characters and lenses. The drifters fashion an igloo out of a haystack, the next morning a farmer's pitchfork takes the roof off of it. Stopover at the hobo camp, where Oklahoma Red (Wallace Beery) makes a roaring entrance with hooch barrel on his shoulder. "Well, I never seen such a lousy flock o' jungle-buzzards!" (He later improvises a kangaroo court, with tinted specs and pistol-gavel and a warning to the defense: "You try that again and you'll be disbarred and dismembered.") The American netherworld, in rags on the margins. Real trains, with the camera on top of them for a rough kind of poetry further explored in Other Men's Women. The rival, The Arkansaw Snake (Robert Perry), reprises the slain stepfather's grabby gestures, the astute heroine vanquishes him by inspiring a brawl. Brooks in boyish cap and pants goes into Wellman's own Wild Boys of the Road, then Sullivan's Travels and also Jules and Jim. While hiding in the cabin, a change of costume and a brute's illumination. "It must be love! I knew there was somethin' wrong with you two." Bittersweet stretto, caboose headed to Canada and burly savior broken on rocky ravine. Aldrich in Emperor of the North turns the ballad into opera. With Blue Washington, Roscoe Karns, Kewpie Morgan, and Guinn "Big Boy" Williams. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |