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The feint is on Waterloo Bridge, The Front Page from another angle gives the meat and potatoes of the tale. She's the salesgirl hoping to avoid mom's fate, respectability is the dream dashed by the absconding rich beau, throughout there's Ann Dvorak's soulfulness behind hard-boiled poses. "Watch your step. It's a tough climb, don't fall off," the underworld smoothie (Leslie Fenton) scoops her up. The years pass, she becomes an unwed mother and a dance-hall staple and, with the infatuated bellhop (Richard Cromwell), an unwitting murder accomplice. On the lam under a peroxide-bottle disguise, she settles in a fleapit and finds her match in the snoop across the hall (Lee Tracy). "I'm a reporter. I read between the sheets." "I used to read in bed myself." A pre-Code spiral at once sordid and snappy, heartache and cheesecake and wisecracks in Michael Curtiz's weepie-gangster-newspaper tragicomedy. An upside-down reflection in the pond gives the lie of the moneyed seducer's propriety, the heroine is jilted at the mansion's door and locates her strength in grime. "Listen, sweetheart: Grab anything you can get. You will still be on the short end." Tracy pops up half an hour into the 73-minute picture and sweeps it into his pocket, his repartee with Dvorak is a tart pas de deux at one point literalized to the accompaniment of a street radio heard through an open window. The slick journo has his eyes set on penning a book in France or a screenplay in Hollywood, and instead surprises the "tinsel girl" with a hopeful ending. "Hey... Wouldn't it be awful if we fell in love?" Wellman runs parallel with Frisco Jenny, Lilly Turner, Midnight Mary... With Guy Kibbee, Frank McHugh, Evalyn Knapp, Charles B. Middleton, Mary Doran, Thomas E. Jackson, C. Henry Gordon, George Chandler, and Louise Beavers. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |