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The arena is promptly sketched, a transmission tower tumbles in a shower of sparks during a thunderstorm, Power & Light Company to the rescue. It's a rowdy institution, the foreman (Edward G. Robinson) has to be pulled away from an unimpressed honky-tonk tootsie. "Dancing is in my blood!" "Must be something wrong with your circulation—it hasn't gone down to your feet yet." Injuries scarcely slow the fellow down, he takes up with a late co-worker's daughter (Marlene Dietrich), who knows how to shade the fatalistic into the cosmetic. (Cigarettes and lipstick at the drugstore mark the first stop after a year behind bars.) The third side of the triangle is the suspicious pal (George Raft), a cool customer until action turns him into a dervish—he smashes a chair over the heads of clip-joint goons and hands the remaining leg to the greeter at the door, "take this in case I wanna come back." The Raoul Walsh liveliness is at every turn, a hot wire of jocularity running through the portrait of high tension in and out of the job. (Wisecracks and pranks rather than the Hawksian sang-froid are the language of the land, mortality is similarly never far.) "He lied and I listened," Dietrich sings through a mouthful of gum, at the Midnight Club she and the gals commiserate when not enduring cackling butterballs. "A new kind of a guy for a dive like this," Robinson at his most spirited, their wedding cake is shaped like two towers bridged by cables. Alan Hale sliding down the station banister, Frank McHugh doing a soft-shoe at the hospital, a sustained electricity made to explode at the climax. "I was out of line, wasn't I?" Ray in They Live by Night remembers the bus-stop view at the close. With Eve Arden, Barton MacLane, Ward Bond, Walter Catlett, Joyce Compton, and Egon Brecher. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |