|
Between Fleischer cartoon and Vigo's L'Atalante, Raoul Walsh's Lower East Side. It begins on a busy waterfront with a reminder of the Depression, the buoyant flatfoot (Spencer Tracy) has his mind on other things: "Aw, nuts to social economy. What's on the sports page?" Brawling kids and vaudeville drunks populate his beat, he's promoted to detective when not falling into the ocean, the tilt of a hat works like a raffish barometer. Puffed-up swagger meets deflating wisecrack, the gum-chewing waitress (Joan Bennett) is his match. "Let me know when you get a day off, will you? I'll take you on a nice trip to the cemetery." The heroine's sister (Marion Burns) is involved with the hoodlum in the attic (George Walsh) so there's a gangster movie lurking in the margins, it momentarily takes over for the proto-Melville minutia of a bank robbery. (Jackhammer and blowtorch cut into the vault from the second floor, interrupting an immigrant family's dinner.) The Irish tugboat captain (J. Farrell MacDonald) censors a suggestive tune by throwing the radio out the window, elsewhere the paralyzed old sergeant (Henry B. Walthall) blinks out Morse code in a parody of Zola's Thérèse Raquin. Amid all this, breezy lovers knocking plates off the diner counter in a feverish embrace. "After a kiss like that, you're gonna have to marry me!" Oodles of charm and virtually experimental tone shifts, plus the semantics of getting smacked in the puss with a fish. The Strange Interlude wooing goes into Annie Hall, the climactic shootout is casually curtailed, "what's a little bullet between friends?" MacDonald's mug in startling close-up trumpets the Walsh stance, a wink and an invitation to the dance. With Noel Madison, Bert Hanlon, Adrian Morris, and George Chandler. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |