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"The love of a mother for her babe passeth all understanding." The opening scenes sketch Barbary Coast ca. 1906 with expressive camera movement and vivid rowdiness, a tracking shot follows a flatfoot past saloon doors and marvels at the ecosystem of broads and brawlers within. (The sidewalk at the end of the shift is littered with clients passed out or thrown out, the girlies gingerly step past them.) The owner's daughter (Ruth Chatterton) hopes to marry the slumming musician (James Murray), the San Francisco Earthquake has other plans, the bottom literally drops during a montage interspersed with grainy actualités. Bad news amid the rubble ("My Gal Sal" on an outdoors piano is a bitter counterpoint), the heroine rebuilds herself. "It may be the wrong way, but it's gonna be my way." William Wellman's The Life of Oharu, rollicking through sorrow. Born in a Chinatown cellar, the son is adopted and becomes a crusading prosecutor (Donald Cook), mom the powerful madam can only see him as newspaper clippings in a scrapbook. The gangland mouthpiece (Louis Calhern) is his main target, decades earlier he shot a man and the rising businesswoman helped with the cover-up. Painful secrets between bootlegging raids and political scandals, "a murderous price." Fates converge at last in the courtroom, where whip pans give the pulse of the oblivious district attorney's spiel against the woman who gave him life. "The gods must be all out to lunch," yet the longtime confidante (Helen Jerome Eddy) insists on a vision of divine balance, wrenchingly accepted in a cell without makeup. "Death, being universal, must be a blessing." With Hallam Cooley, Pat O'Malley, Harold Huber, Robert Emmett O'Connor, Berton Churchill, and J. Carrol Naish. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |