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From Armistice to Wall Street Crash, "this film is a memory." The opening is a gag to set the barrel-rolling tone, three doughboys in a WWI crater trading quips and cigarettes amid explosions. Back in America, the rotten one (Humphrey Bogart) joins the mob, the righteous one (Jeffrey Lynn) turns to the law, the one in between (James Cagney) slides from "forgotten man" to impetuous bootlegger. The soldier's homecoming is a ramshackle tenement, the elusive babe (Priscilla Lane) turns out to be a schoolgirl with a song (Anderson's The Master), the hooch racket is the answer for the discarded warrior "tired of shadowboxing." As a rival Prohibition shark (Paul Kelly) circles the territory, Bogart looks at Cagney and scoffs: "You must have been reading about Napoleon!" If Raoul Walsh didn't invent the Warners style, then he certainly brought it to its electric apex with this catalogue of speakeasies, raids, betrayals and shootouts, a scrappy chart of the Jazz Age's fickle waves of opulence and ruin. (Liquored-up collisions and clouds of scattered bills figure in Don Siegel's montages, imagistic cascades verging on the Vertovian.) The tragedy of a nation awakening to the joyride's hangover, of the man who can't see the soulful sadness of the weathered chanteuse (Gladys George) right by his side. Crime as a mushrooming business, a wad of soiled cash ("This is a corporation," surely a Robert Rossen line) dilated in Force of Evil and abstracted in Point Blank. Heading out to the showdown, the ruined protagonist pauses to contemplate the empty beer mug on a saloon piano; his demise on the steps of a church is a Pietà for the entire mythology of the gangster genre. (Consider White Heat a resurrection and a derangement.) With Frank McHugh, Elisabeth Risdon, Edward Keane, Joe Sawyer, Joseph Crehan, and Abner Biberman. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |