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"Awfully interesting people," gangsters, from the beginning understood as emblematic to the cinema. Raoul Walsh is quite ahead of the curve, he dollies in to frame the wispy orphan at a table flanked by a pair of burly, brawling guardians, and uses an iris out on his bewildered face. (Later he uses an iris in on a trio of Black musicians on stage, and dollies out to reveal the rowdy hall of The Bowery.) Grimy New York tenements and bars and waterfronts for the young protagonist (Rockliffe Fellowes), "the only environment he knows." On one side the reformist district attorney (Carl Harbaugh), on the other the gang member (William Sheer) like a stranded pirate, eyepatch and all. The mediator is the society girl slumming at the settlement house (Anna Q. Nilsson), the ethereal embodiment of connection. "A new world... education, inspiration and—love." The debt to Griffith is clear (and repaid in Broken Blossoms, vide the heroine in the closet and the fist through the door), though the vigor and frankness of the detailed images are Walsh's own. Location filming enhances a splendid set piece, the Hudson River outing with its swirling dancers giving way to pandemonium as a fire breaks out. (It ends with a disarming vérité shot of girls playing amid the drenched crowd aboard a towboat.) The shrouded Madonna with baby on the church steps points up the Irish Catholic element shared with Ford, Keaton recalls the helter-skelter collision with the police department. A matter of highs and lows, the escape on suspended clotheslines brought down by the dwarf's bullet. "We are even now." The raffish line of thought passes through Wellman's The Public Enemy and ripples on to Leone's Once Upon a Time in America. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |