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The genre crossroads where the gangster's nostalgia in The Roaring Twenties gazes ahead to the antihero alienation of film noir. (Raoul Walsh further enriches the mix by retelling the story as a Western in Colorado Territory.) The underworld is full of "young twerps, soda-jerkers and jitterbugs," the Old Guard (Donald MacBride) expires in bed with bourbon glass while callow nitwits (Arthur Kennedy, Alan Curtis) hop around with pistols, "not much of the ol' bunch left." Humphrey Bogart's "Mad Dog" Earle steps out of the clink and heads over to the park to feel the verdure beneath his feet. Hardened criminal and closet transcendentalist, he alarms a jumpy accomplice (Cornel Wilde) by tapping his fingers on a violin case while recalling a machine-gun execution, then improvises some cosmic lyricism for the club-footed ingénue (Joan Leslie). "Why, that sounds like poetry!" The Dillinger syndrome, "just rushing toward death," thus the taut, death-scented beauty of Bogart's performance instinctively allied to a clip-joint drifter (Ida Lupino) and a bad-luck pooch. The Oakie's journey West by way of W.R. Burnett and John Huston, not Steinbeck's California but "the land of milk and honey for the health racket," resort towns and manicured palm trees surrounded by deserts and frigid mountains. Walsh choreographs all of this with an implacable forward push—placed between rocky Lone Pine curves, the camera twice pans 360° to take in the car chase madly skidding by. Bierstadt compositions receive the finale, Bogart's snarl echoing across Mt. Whitney and Lupino's desperate eyes lost amid the audience in "the coldest place in the world." Becker virtually remakes it in Touchez Pas au Grisbi, Tarantino in Jackie Brown remembers the aging hood's smile alone in the car. With Henry Travers, Henry Hull, Jerome Cowan, Minna Gombell, Barton MacLane, Elisabeth Risdon, Paul Harvey, and Willie Best. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |